Then, of course, everything changed - even inside our fake reality of psychotic fandom. Nothing will be funny for a while. The boogieman got us again, as he always does. He pops up in Oklahoma City or Phoenix, Newtown or New York - he hurts us and laughs, 'You're it," and then - bang - he's gone. Sometimes we catch him and slap him into chains, but later, when you see him in court - like that Holmes character in Aurora or the basket case who shot Gabby Giffords - you realize the lights are out and the boogieman got away. He's off somewhere else. And yesterday he came to Boston.
When terrible things happen, a whole city goes through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grieving. It will be many years - maybe more than I have left - before Boston reaches that final state of acceptance. There will be the tears, the silences, the flowery shrines, the iconic photographs, the trials, the books, the movies, the anniversaries and the national vows to never let it happen again - when of course, that's impossible. The boogieman is always out there. Always was. Always will be.
I recall an old comic book - who knows, maybe Mustang wrote it - where everything looks bleak for Batman, and suddenly the Joker pops up to save him. He says, "You're my arch-enemy, and nobody else is going to get you." That's sort of how I think Yankee fans feel about Boston today. Those Pedroia fans, dammit, they're ours. How dare the boogieman attack them.
That was our job. Today, it's not the same. It won't be for a long long time.
Oh, for the innocence of "Boston Sucks" vs. "Mother Fucking Yankees."
ReplyDeleteI feel exactly the way that you do.
ReplyDeleteBut that said, in the days after 9/11 I was CRAVING normalcy. Each day that followed, as I checked the news, I was hoping for articles about local crimes and tax bills or whatever the hell they were working on in the pre-9/11 days. I begged my family not to watch the coverage with the same footage of the towers falling. My dad had just retired from the NYPD and it was too painful for me to think that if he had not retired a few months earlier he could have been a first responder. He could have been killed.
My best friend is a die-hard Red Sox fan. I didn't know him in 2001. We met in 2002. He told me later that he was rooting against the Yankees in the World Series, that he cheered the bloop hit that lost it. I wasn't even mad. If anything, I think that would have made me happy in 2001. To see that there was enough normalcy left in the world that I could still depend on one thing: A Yankees/Red Sox rivalry.
I stand with the city of Boston 100% and I feel their pain, because it literally was my (our) pain eleven or so years ago. But I hope we can get back to the rivalry as quickly as possible, for their sakes and ours. Baseball has the power to soothe us. It's the nature of the game. And for me, there is no game without a Yankee/Sox rivalry.
My prayers are with the whole country as we heal.
Jackie Yastremski is batting .097, by the way. He's gonna have to be healing at Pawtucket.
ReplyDeleteI'm mad. And what's making me madder is wondering when Dick Cheney is going to stick his snarling stented face onto the tube and tell everyone that this never would have happened when he was in power.
ReplyDeleteSure, there was that little 9/11 thing, but Cheney and Co. keep America safe after that. Except for the gun stuff. And the oil spill stuff. But there wasn't another terrorist attack.
Yeah, I know my shrink would've said that I'm subverting my pain and sorrow and turning it into hatred against another target.
But, oh, what a deserving target he is.
I still blame Cheney for our collapse against the Redsocks in 2004.
ReplyDeleteYou can give Cheney and Bush all the credit you'd like but the fact is this kind of incident is almost impossible to prevent in the long run. sure, we disrupt plan after plan and sometimes we just get lucky but all the bad guys need is to be successful once. Baseball is a game and our "hated" Redsock players and fans are just all part of the fun. God bless them. Without them my life would be missing something very important.
ReplyDeleteWithout them, 2012 would have sucked.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that the "authorities" are interrogating every "dark-skinned" person with a "foreign accent" who was injured by the bombing. So I should feel much safer, right?
ReplyDeleteKD, I meant that Cheney and Co. claiming that they kept us safe was b.s. but expected him to come out soon to point it out, in an effort to damage Obama.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I wasn't clear. I was mad.
I wouldn't give those guys credit for being able to hit the urinal.
I wonder if The Master will refrain from A-Bombs, Pronk's Bomber, and a Nuke from Youk in light of what happened yesterday. Tune into WCBS at 6:30 for the Pregame Show.
ReplyDeleteVery classy. Good post, Duque.
ReplyDeleteCheney will be on Meet the Press this Sunday and will claim this attack wouldn't have happened if President Bush's enhanced interrogation policies weren't disbanded by President Obama. I guarantee it.
ReplyDeleteWhoa whoa. Care about Boston? All of you have gone soft.
ReplyDeleteLast time i checked both of those planes came from Boston. Am i saying Boston was in on it? Well let's think back to 2001. The red sox were getting embarrassed in the standings, no chance of making the playoffs.Their year was over and they wanted some payback on the Yanks. So they did to New York what Wolf "The Dentist" Stansson did to Gordan Bombay, but with planes instead of hockey sticks. Somebody get Jesse Ventura on this, again.
And let's be real.This kind of thing happens in Chicago everyday.