The Newell Post

My Catholic Church has endeavored to hide behind the concept of a Statute of Limitations in its defense against suits brought by victims of sexual abuse at the hands of its priests. This embarrasses me to no end and adds to the despair that all Catholics share regarding the sexual atrocities that were allowed covered up and enabled by Church leadership.

I do not remember reading about a Statute of Limitations in the Baltimore Catechism but I do remember reading about the concept of mortal sin. It seems to me that, if the Church continues to hide behind legal technicalities in order to avoid bankrupting the Church this will only add to the number of mortal sins that have been committed by our Church leaders. Catholics must take back the Church from these people who would destroy it.

David Brooks is an excellent op-ed columnist for the New York Times. His essays are always thought provoking and most often enlightening. They are never polemics trashing one political party or the other or one candidate or the other. A recent column was entitled The Great Divorce. At first I thought he was referencing the novel by CS Lewis but rather than addressing the issue of life after death as Lewis’ work had done, Brooks wrote of the ever expanding gap between the two social castes in twenty first century America.

I have been saying for years that when I was a mail clerk for P. Lorillard Corp back in the late ‘60’s early ‘70’s when I was making about five thousand dollars a year that the CEO of Lorillard was probably making at most a hundred grand maybe two hundred. Certainly he was not making a million. After all in 1968 Mickey Mantle was only making a hundred grand and Joe Namath cashed in at four hundred grand. The point being that the gap between me, the lowest paid employee in the company, and the CEO was only about ninety five G’s or one hundred and ninety five G’s. Today, that gap would be measured in the millions.

But, Brooks’ article was not focused on the income and wealth gap but the cultural gap that divides us. The stimulus for his article was a book by Charles Murray, ‘Coming Apart.’ In it Murray describes that the gap that we have most recently been focused on, that being the One Percenters versus the Ninety Nine Percenters does not tell the tale. The real gap is between the Top Twenty and Bottom Thirty.

Certainly focusing on the One Percenters is a more attractive strategy as very few of us are members of that group. Blaming them for all our problems and for the problems of the poor and the uneducated takes some of the heat off of us. It’s not our fault that so many people have fallen through society’s cracks. Certainly the Bottom Thirty can blame them, and anybody else for that matter, for their lowly fate. The Ninety Nine has found absolution in the One Percent. No need for repentance. No need to change. No need to do anything at all except point the finger of blame.

When it comes to the Twenty Percenters, however, many of us can no longer hide behind the very rich. More importantly, neither can the Lower Thirty. Poverty can be blamed for a lot of things. The fact is we have always had a poor class in this country and while there have always been social issues affecting the poorest including substance abuse and violence, (just watch Gangs of New York on Netflix to illustrate this), it is only in our recent history that we have seen such a widespread rejection of traditional social and moral values among the poor.

A familiar vignette that I have witnessed on numerous occasions is a mother walking her toddler on a cold winter’s day on a Brooklyn avenue. The mother is not holding the child’s hand, the child has no gloves or mittens on, and the mother is otherwise

preoccupied with her cell phone conversation. I just look and think that she has money for a phone and a phone plan but no money for gloves for her child?

On another occasion, a few years ago, I was a member of our school board and I called the Superintendent just to check in. It was another cold winter’s day and the Superintendent was out of the building. About an hour later she called me back and explained why she was out of the building. One of the children appeared on the school’s doorsteps without a coat. She asked the child why she didn’t have a coat on and was told that she did not have one. The Superintendent brought the child into the building and immediately went out and bought the child a coat. This is a touching and terrific story about a great lady but I include it hear to ask where were the parent’s of that child?

I can understand that a family could lack the resources to buy clothes but in this day and age all they would have to do is to ask.

On another day, in the spring this time, I observed a parent smoking a joint in his car while his kid played little league baseball with my son. Sorry, I don’t care how poor you are, how uneducated you are, or what kind of a sad sack life you had as a kid, stand up and be a man. Be a parent. Hock the phone, get some mittens. Go to a church, ask for help. Get your ass out of the car and your head out of your ass and go watch your kid play baseball!

The biggest disappointment I have in our President goes back to his inaugural address. On that day in 2009 he declared that ‘The Era of Responsibility’ had arrived. I took this to mean that parents would be held accountable for the actions of their children much as Wall Street Executives would be for their financial actions. Instead, we have gotten the same bull shit that it is the schools and ineffective teachers who are to blame for the academic failures of our children. No parent is ever put on notice for sending their child ill prepared for school. Talk to teachers and find out if kids arrive at school with homework done or if the parents have ever read to their children. For the Top Twenty parents the answers to these questions would in all likelihood be yes. For the Bottom Thirty, probably no is the more common response.

Growing up in the Bronx in what I had always thought of as a middle class lifestyle, all of my friends had parents who worked, who struggled to put us through Catholic Schools, who made sure we went to school prepared, who made sure we had warm and clean if not brand new clothes and who taught us how to interact with people. The fact is we were not middle class economically. Most of us lived in small apartments. Some of us had a phone. Some families had a car. But all had middle class values. Work hard, fly right and get a good education.

In education today we keep hearing about “First Generation” students. These are students who are the first in their family to go to college. In my neighborhood, we were First Generation high school students. The fact that out parents had not benefited from a formal education beyond the eighth grade did not prevent them from being good parents. The fact that our parents did not make more than ten thousand dollars a year did not prevent them from enriching our lives in every way. Perhaps the greatest thing they did for us was to show us how to be a parent with or without money.

This is what really made them The Greatest Generation and it’s their values that need to be adopted and adhered to.

 (Note: This was written in April but baseball fans might enjoy it, nonetheless.)

This week is opening day for major league baseball. I wrote ‘week’ because Major League Baseball, the organization as opposed to the game, determined that there should be a number of opening days. For example, there was the opening day for the Mariners and A’s which occurred last week in Japan. Then, last night was opening ‘Day’ (more irony) for the Cardinals and Marlins because the Marlins have this new ballpark requiring its own opening day. Then of course we have opening days on Thursday and Friday. Life used to be simpler and so was baseball so I guess we have to get over it. What some baseball fans can’t or refuse to get over is the designated hitter or DH. To them I say, get over it.

The DH came to the American League back in the ‘70s when baseball was dying. Football became king and attendance at baseball games was dropping. The Yankees no longer had competitive teams and pitching was dominant. Since only the true purist likes watching grass grow or pitching duels as they are more commonly called, the AL initiated the DH at the same time when both leagues lowered the pitching mound to give some advantage to hitters. No one had thought about steroids at this time. The NL did not want the DH and if you listen to baseball analysts or fans of the NL you would think that the DH has ruined baseball.

Forget for the moment that at the time that the DH came into the AL that the NL was putting in Astro Turf all through the league, and in my view, this had a greater, negative impact on the game than the DH ever did. Even the NL has walked away from artificial turf but they still hold true to their anti DH bias. The thought is that the DH takes all the strategy out of the game, leaving the manager with nothing to do. They are right of course.

There is nothing like being at a NL game when in the fourth inning in one of those white knuckle, pitcher’s duels we finally have a rally as the number eight hitter draws a walk. The stage is set. The score is 0-0, bottom of the fourth, man on first, and no out. The number nine hitter, the pitcher, is in the on deck circle. He wipes some pine tar on his bat, kicks off the weight that he used to make his bat seem lighter when he gets up, and he approaches the batter’s box. What will he do? What will happen next? I am on the edge of my seat trying to anticipate what the manager will call here. What happens next is simply amazing.

The pitcher looks over to first just daring the base runner to take off. He toes the rubber and pitches from the stretch. WAIT, IT’s A PITCHOUT! What a sneaky bastard! He wanted to see if the batter would tip his hand while at the same time trying to catch the base runner in a preemptive pickoff. Man, can it get better than this?

Well, the batter did not tip his hand because he, being a pitcher himself, knows all the tricks of the game. Then, with the second pitch on its way, the batter/pitcher squares to bunt! I couldn’t believe my eyes what a call that was! Now, with the ball dribbling towards the first baseman the base runner scampers all the way to second as the pitcher/batter successfully returns to the dugout being high fived and backslapped all the way in. Baseball is such a cool game. But it gets better.

The next batter hits a hard grounder to the second baseman giving the base runner the opportunity to run to third. Now there are two out and the runner is stranded after the next batter strikes out looking. It was exciting and ever so close to seeing a run but the pitcher’s duel continues.

Then in the seventh inning and our pitcher who so expertly executed the bunt is now facing the heart of the order but there is a problem. His pitch count is up to 80 and he just doesn’t have the same zip on his 85 MPH fastball. What do you think the manager will do? I was going over this very question in my mind and I was coming up empty. It’s a perplexing problem that only the most seasoned strategist could solve.

Just when you thought there was nothing that could be done, the manager hops out of the dugout and heads for the home plate umpire. What IS he doing? He talks to the ump for a minute at most and then heads to the pitcher’s mound. He takes the ball from the pitcher and pats him on the ass. I’m making no judgments. Then he motions to the bull pen for a lefty, a crafty lefty no doubt because this is one crafty manager. But wait! What else is he doing? He’s bringing in a new first baseman! The DOUBLE SWITCH! Oh MAN! This is BASEBALL BABY!

You see, the original pitcher is due to lead off while the original first baseman was the last man up in the previous inning. So, by bringing in two players at the same time the new pitcher will take the place of the old first baseman in the batting order thereby taking the pitcher out of the lead off spot next inning and substituting the new first baseman in his stead.

This is unbelievable. I always tell my kids that you never know what you are going to see at a baseball game, history is only one swing or, in this case, one of the most clever strategies of all time, away.

You see, in the AL we don’t have this type of excitement. The only time we bunt is when the players are really, really tired. The pitcher never hits because pitchers never hit. We let the DH hit rather than putting up the pitcher who winds up looking like a complete Nuttsy Fagin with a broom in his hand.

The pitcher gets to continue to do what he does best which, of course, is pitch. Now granted the AL has sacrificed the thrill of the double switch in favor of, oh I don’t know, exciting baseball, but we have learned to live with its shortcomings. But next week when I go to my first Yankee game I will think back to those exciting NL moments when the pitcher bunted and the manager double switched and I will think:

THANK GOD ALMIGHTY I WAS BORN A YANKEE FAN

I was going to write a blog about classification and ethnicity. I came upon a new proposal for a college application while reading one of my education journals and it angered me. There must have be forty different groups from which an applicant could select to identify her or himself. Then there was White. It pissed me off. Here there were all these exotic groups from exotic countries and, had I been an applicant, all I could choose was white. I mean, the only thing white about me is my hair. I don’t want to be classified by my hair let me tell you. But I had a solution.

Among the fifty thousand (I may be exaggerating here) selections you could opt for there was also ‘other’. Ok, I said. Here is where I can be represented the way I want to be represented. In my pretend application I entered BRONX BLUE-EYED IRISH YANKEE JET RANGER FAN AMERICAN.

If you’re going to classify me, that’s how I want it to go down. Why should any school or sick, perverted,  government statistician get to decide how I see myself and how I want others to see me? White? Not so fast bukco. This here citizen is a BBEIYJRFA. Stick that in your algorithm.

As for the rest of you? You are on your own which is exactly as it should be. Why do we need to know where you originated from? On an individual basis it’s one of the things that we reveal when we get to know people but there is no reason to have to reveal that sort of thing to strangers. I don’t call Cablevision, let’s say, and start off with ‘Hey I’m a white guy in East Quogue and my cable just went out.’ (I’m guessing some of you wish my internet access went out, huh?) No, that has no relevance to the service I am requesting.

There is a great deal of information about us that we don’t need to share. No one asks us what foods we like when applying for a mortgage. Who cares about whether we are on Facebook when we hire someone to mow our grass. I can’t begin to think of all the information that never comes up when you enter into a contract with someone. My feeling is, then, if there is some information that contracting parties don’t care to know about each other, why, then, should anyone else care to know. Are you following me?

For example, if I’m a Bronx Blue-Eyed Irish Yankee Jet Ranger Fan American and I enter into a contract with someone who is a Bronx Brown-Eyed Italian Met Giant Islander Fan American, does that affect your ability to enter into a contract with someone else that may or may not be a member of either of these groups? Do you even care that I enter into a contract with anyone for any reason? You see where I’m heading don’t you?

That same logic leads me to conclude that no one should worry about whatever types of contracts people elect to enter. Marriage is a contract. Whether you enter into this type of contract or a contract to purchase a car has the same effect on my ability to do the same which is to say, it has no effect.

It seems that, if we are to accept what we read in the papers and see on TV that there are quite a few people who want to restrict and preserve the right to enter into a marital contract for some reason or other. When someone we know is getting married we may have our own opinion as to whether it is a good match or if they are ready for that type of commitment. If you have the nerve and audacity to give an opinion, the loving couple can tell you to take a leap. That’s how it should be and that’s how it is….except for some.

You see, if you entered an answer in a particular data field onto the Big Data Entry Form that would deign to rule our lives, ‘They’ might not want to let you get married. The fact that you want to assert your willingness to love, honor, and let the other person think you will obey, is all fine and dandy. If you answered that one question the wrong way for the Bedroom Censors of The Holier Than Thou Agency, we ain’t gonna let ya.

Don’t bother telling them that the people they allow and openly encourage to get married have a fifty-fifty chance of keeping their end of their contract. They are only interested in the type of data that can pigeon hole you and categorize you. Their data is not to be used to help you interpret anything, only to put you in your place.

We all know what that question is. But I have a question too. Why do we care? The fact is that heterosexuals are not exactly sanctifying the contract of marriage. Fifty percent of marriages do fail. No one is asking what these couples do or don’t do in bed so what are we worried about if we extend this  basic, human right to love another individual while enjoying the protections of the law that they each enjoy as single individuals

I really don’t get it and I am tired of being dictated to by a bunch or rebel, pseudo religious fanatics who think the Civil War is still raging.

We won’t let you get married but you can buy a gun at Wal-Mart. Not sure what Gospel that was in.

Posted by The Newell Post at 8:21 PM

Welcome to WordPress.com! This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

Happy blogging!