Interview #41: Politics and Baseball
Aaron Rupar, independent journalist with Public Notice
Intro
Aaron Rupar is an independent journalist who publishes his substack newsletter, Public Notice, four times a week. The Minnesota native grew up a Twins, Timberwolves and Vikings fan (the North Stars went all snowbird and moved to Dallas in his childhood, so he became the rare upper Midwest kid without an obsession with hockey).
He’s been in journalism since college after covering local Minneapolis politics, which lead him to a stint in Washington D.C. working for Think Progress and then Vox before going independent. He moved back to Minneapolis to be closer to extended family. We talked about baseball (obviously), covering politics, being a journalist and using sports as a way to decompress and also connect with people on the opposite side of the political aisle.
You can sign up for his newsletter here: Public Notice
Or follow him on Twitter here: @atrupar
Being a Sports Fan in Minnesota
Did you play baseball?
Yeah, I did. I played baseball through middle school and then I ended up playing high school tennis. I enjoy baseball to a point, but I found it be kind of dull; like as a kid, I was wanting to do more. When you're playing right field or something, you're just picking daisies out there. When I started playing tennis, I was really drawn to it because I really enjoyed the part of that game where it's one-on-one, it feels like you're really in control of the situation.
So you were bored with baseball and you moved on to tennis?
When I had to pick which one I wanted to play, it was a pretty easy call. I just enjoyed playing tennis more. I think I became more into sports in my 30s. I always followed it, like even at my lowest point of baseball fandom, which was probably around like 2012, 2013, I was still going to 8 to 10 games a year. But for whatever reason, I don't know if maybe there was something correlating with getting more into political media and just needing escapes from that. But I think these days I'm probably as much into sports as I ever have been.
Do you go to a lot of Twins games?
Yeah, I go to quite a few. They have a deal up here where it's $70 a month and you get a standing room ticket to every game. I don't go to all of them, but I probably go to three or four a month, usually.
So that is a lot.
Yeah. It's a good way to decompress. They're a pretty fun team this year; I probably wouldn't go to quite as many if they weren't pretty decent. Having little kids, it's an easy way to get away for a few hours in the evening if we have childcare covered for a date with my wife, we'll do dinner and things like that. So it's one of our main social outings at this point.
So it's only 70 bucks a month?
It's a pretty good deal, they've had it for the last number of years. The Twins ticket sales are pretty soft. Last I had looked, which was a few weeks ago, they were 24th in the league in attendance (note: as of 6/30 they’re 24th averaging 21,384), so I think they're mainly just happy to get people in the door. The ushers are pretty lax about where you sit; I'll usually end up sitting pretty prime seats behind one of the dugouts. It's one of the silver linings of ticket sales being soft is that they offer this deal and you sit wherever you want.
Does the cold weather in the spring hurt attendance?
April games can be unpleasant. We had some early this season where it's like 35°, 40° and the way the stadium is designed, it's a very nice stadium, but it gets windy, especially if you're in the upper level. Usually the first month or so can be pretty sparse, but now that we're in nice weather, it's picked up a little bit. It's a pretty soft baseball market. They hadn't won a playoff series, until last season, in like 20 years. And so I think it's a combination of it being a soft baseball market anyway and then there was so much frustration surrounding the team. Then they had a fun year last year, but then of course, they cut, like, $30million from their payroll over the winter. And so they negated a lot of the momentum they had. (note: their 2024 payroll right now is $135m, down $46mil from 2023’s $181m figure).
Minneapolis isn’t a baseball town? What's the number one draw there, then?
Definitely the number one draw is the Vikings. We have a lot of teams here, because there's also the University of Minnesota campus, so we have all the D1 sports, and then we have the big four; then the Lynx have a pretty good fan base in the WNBA and then we have an MLS team too. It's weird because this year that finally changed for the Timberwolves; I have season tickets to the Timberwolves, too. Finally this year, there was a lot of excitement and they were selling out, I think they sold out pretty much every game this season. But the Twins have never really hit that level. Other than the Vikings, it can be pretty fickle for the fan bases. The Wild have a pretty devoted fan base, and they had a huge sellout streak. But it's definitely Vikings number one. The Wild are #2, but then it's the Wolves and Twins at the bottom. And I think the Twins are pretty clearly at the bottom right now just because they cut a bunch of money from their payroll and it tends to be a soft baseball town anyway.
What was it like in the early 2000s when they wanted to get rid of the Twins?
I was going to a lot of games at that time because I was in high school. They were playing at the Metrodome; I went to a lot of games ‘cause it was like $3 for general admission. They had some really lean years. They won the title in ‘91 and then basically from ‘93 until like ’01, they were one of the worst teams in the league every year. And that was such a weird setup because, like we were talking about, it gets nicer and people want to go to games. When you're playing indoors, it's inverted where if you wanna be outside, obviously you're not going to baseball games, you're sitting in this weird dome.
Another factor with the Twins has been that their ownership has always been pretty tight and that was certainly the case back then. Back in the day, being at the Dome and there'd be 7,000 people in a 50,000 attendance arena, especially when the team was bad. Of course there were all the rumors that they were going to try and contract the team or relocate and that really stunk and not a lot of fun to live through as a baseball fan.
A few years after that, they finally got the new downtown ballpark, which is beautiful. But that's part of the legacy is that, if you're my age, when they won in ‘91, I was 7, so I was pretty young. And then they didn't win another playoff game for a long time, let alone a series. So there just isn't like with teams that have a really proud tradition and you build up generational loyalty. It's been a little harder to do here just because, going back to ‘91, it's been pretty lean for any sort of success.
(note: from 1993 to 2001, the Twins were the 3rd worst team in baseball with a .441 win percentage and 0 playoff berths)
So what's kept you a fan of baseball? That it's always there in the background and you can come and go as you please?
Yeah, I think so. The season is to me what sets it apart from the other sports. I think I'm probably more of an NBA person overall, I probably know more about the NBA and track it more closely as a league than I do baseball. We get the kids to bed at like 9:00 usually and then if I'm doing work in the background, turn on a West Coast game. I've probably watched more Giants games this year than I would normally, but they just are on late at night here. (note: can never go wrong with Kruk and Kuip on in the background) Even if I'm not really engrossed in it, I'll have it on, even if I'm just putzing around with the newsletter, doing something on my computer. And I'm kind of the same way with the NBA, too, where I end up watching a lot of the West Coast games just ‘cause it's something to have on late at night and they're entertaining.
Then you lived in DC. When was that?
I was there from ‘16 through ‘20. Probably the most fun I've had as a sports fan was their (Nationals) 2019 World Series run. I went to all the playoff games with the exception of one that year. We went to a couple of games on the road that season. For whatever reason, just happened to be a team that I really followed the whole year. To this day, despite being pretty much a Minnesota lifer, it took me a couple of years to warm up to the Nats, but then by the time 2017 rolled around, I was pretty much watching every game and going to a ton of games out there. That was really, really fun and unexpected because there's a whole myth around that team, because early June they were 19-31 and then they just had a crazy run the last four or five months of the season. That was interesting too, because, the DC fan base for baseball was quite soft at that time where they had 100-win teams in ‘16 and ‘17 and they weren't drawing super well. But then the whole city really got behind that playoff team; it was the first time they had advanced in the playoffs that year since they moved back to DC.
So that was really cool. Just the bar scene for those games and how the whole city really got on the bandwagon and then of course the parade and everything. Then COVID hit and so they didn't really have a proper follow up; obviously there were no fans at the games the next season and by the time they had fans again in 2021, the team had been pretty… either guys had aged out or it wasn't the same team and so they never really had a proper celebration. Still, I think that's the most fun I've had as a sports fan, just that entire playoff run.
So living in DC must’ve been hectic. Did you, or did you notice people, go to Nationals games as a way to get away from the political world?
I think some certainly do. I’d mostly go to games there with my more friend group than colleagues and whatnot. I saw that a little bit just with people that I cover in politics who seem to be into the Nats and view going to games in that same way that I that I do. I think when you work in political media, and obviously covering a lot of these topics in politics can be taxing, for lack of better way to put it, in that they're high stakes issues and polarizing issues where people have very strong opinions. You become a target or part of the story where like, you're part of the liberal media that people like to hate on, and so that can be stressful. I guess everybody has their ways of trying to find other things to do than just being consumed by it all the time. Part of it was, when I was a kid, my dad would take me to games and so I grew up around sports. I carried that to DC. I was a little bit surprised in hindsight that I got into the Nats as much as I did. They were really fun team and they were really good.
And then in ‘17 or ‘18 the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup too, right?
Yep, they won in ‘18. I'm not a huge hockey guy. I mean, I do enjoy it-
You're from Minnesota, and you're not a hockey guy?
I grew up playing basketball. We didn't have an NHL team for a good chunk of my childhood after the North Stars moved, so I don't know if that played a part of it too. I certainly watched a lot of those games, but I felt like more of a spectator; I wasn't really emotionally invested in it like I was with the Nats and with the Twins, or the Wolves or I'm a Vikings fan, too. I feel the same way about the Wild that I did about the Caps, where I'm happy for their fans when they win and if they ever had a playoff run like the Wolves did this year, it'd be really fun, and I'd maybe try to go to a game somewhere in there, but I'm a casual for sure.
That's like me. I'm from the Bay Area, so we had… well, we used to have a lot more teams, but the Warriors were awful. So when they started winning and they had their dynasty, I was like, well, I can't just jump on that bandwagon. But, good for my friends who’ve been through it.
I hear you. I went to a Giants game once out there, and actually the Twins are in Oakland tonight and it's obviously the final time they'll be out there. I talked with a buddy of mine where we're talking about trying to get out there, just it didn't happen, which I'm regretting, ‘cause it'd be cool to. I've never been to the A’s stadium. Maybe I'll catch one of the games in Sacramento.
Sadly that stadium and atmosphere has flatlined.
Yeah, it's too bad cause I used to go out to San Francisco every year for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, and one of those years, (2014), where the A's were really good and the Giants were really good, the festival’s in October. So I remember even going to the festival and you'd see groups of A's fans and groups of Giants fans. There's just such a buzz around baseball. I always thought that was such a fun dynamic, just the A’s-Giants dual fanbases out there and such a long history of baseball in Oakland. It's just a bad look for baseball. The NBA doesn't really have zombie franchises like that. I know you guys just lived through that with the NHL team in Phoenix.
☹. RIP Coyotes
Like a team that's sort of one foot out the door, and with the A's, I guess at this point, they're not even competing, really. I just think it's a bad look for the league to have teams that aren't really trying.
It is interesting to hear that the Twins aren’t a bigger draw in Minnesota than I would have guessed. But then when you think about the most successful Twins era, that was over 30 years ago now, with the 1987 and 1991 World Series wins and a run of stars in town like Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek and manager Tom Kelly was also beloved. Even with their resurgence in the 2000s behind Johan Santana, Justin Morneau, Torii Hunter and Joe Mauer, they didn’t seem to be as big a story nationally, though Morneau and Mauer did win MVPs and Santana won 2 Cy Young awards. But in that time, it felt like any team in the AL that got in the way of Red Sox-Yankees coverage was an annoyance to Fox and ESPN. The lack of postseason success hurts, too, but the A’s of that time didn’t have postseason success, either, and that era is still looked back at fondly. And looking at those names, you’d think that plus winning plus a gorgeous ballpark would be all the ingredients you need to cement yourself as a baseball city.
And then you contrast that with Aaron’s time in DC during the Nationals run and ultimately winning the 2019 World Series. They had been playoff disappointments during their run of contention with Scherzer, Harper, Rendon, Strasburg, Zimmerman and then everything clicked with the 2019 team (without Harper but replacing him with Juan Soto isn’t a steep drop-off at all). Plus that team had characters, role players stepping up like Howie Kendrick, and Stephen Strasburg carrying the pitching staff. It’s runs like that that will make lasting impacts on local fans, even national fans. Hopefully they’re able to get that rebuild done fast and retain those fans before they fade away.
Being a Journalist Covering a National Political Beat
Had you always wanted to be a journalist? Did you go to school for journalism?
No, I didn't. I have a master’s degree in philosophy. So I was doing the academic route right out of college and that was right during the Great Recession. I had so many colleagues in grad school that were getting their PhD's and then getting these pretty undesirable adjunct teaching jobs for low pay and often very rural or exurban locations. I was doing journalism on the side almost as a way to help pay some bills. I was writing for a local community newspaper covering city council meetings and so it wasn't glamorous at all. I was a freelancer and it was just a way to supplement my income from being a teaching assistant.
When I decided to leave grad school, I was scrambling. My first thought was maybe going to law school and go the lawyer route. And then just from applying for a bunch of jobs, I got a job for a community newspaper in Minneapolis doing more feature-length stuff and it was a little more involved than the community journalism I had been doing, so that was a little more interesting.
That got me into covering state-level politics and I started covering a lot of local Republicans. I didn't really commit to doing journalism as a career until I moved to DC. I got a job with Think Progress in 2016. From there I went to Vox and then went independent, so I mean it was very accidental. But even when I was in grad school, I've always had an interest in news media and news and politics and so it was sort of a dream gig.
I left journalism for a bit to work in political comms, it was a state job for the House Democrats, doing comms work. I just found it to be really, really dull. So then I was desperate to get back into journalism, which led me to DC. And then basically COVID brought us back here.
We just bought a condo in DC right before COVID hit, and we had a newborn. Neither of us obviously had to be in an office, and so we came here to basically pod up with my family when everybody was quarantining and then they could meet their grandkids. By the time we both got done with parental leave, we didn't really have any reason to go back to DC. Now having two kids, this just feels like a more comfortable place to raise kids than living in the city does.
When did you go independent?
Fall of ‘21. I was at Vox for three years. It's worked out really well; I was already a workaholic as it was, but I think going independent made that even more challenging because it's just… like at Vox, you still have vacation, I had parental leave, there’s still structured ways to take breaks. And now I rarely take time off. If I do, I usually end up working ahead of time, to have newsletters that are already ready to go. So that is one of the difficult things is just achieving any sort of balance.
Has leaving DC changed how you cover politics?
It's a little bit disadvantageous for my line of work just because there's a lot of opportunities to do TV hits and whatnot. One of the problems we have here is that we live in a condo building where we can't get the fastest Wi-Fi. I've done some cable TV stuff and I've done some video podcasts, but we don't have premier Internet speeds here.
I collaborated just last week with my former boss on this piece that generated a lot of buzz about Sinclair News and how they're using their local broadcasts to launder right wing smears about Biden into local news, and he had a couple opportunities to go on MSNBC, and he lives in DC so he just went down the street into one of their studios and did the hit right from there. Being remote, it's a little more difficult for me to do stuff like that, which are good opportunities for building your brand and getting your name out there, so I do miss that part of being in DC and I feel a little out of the mix. We live in such an interconnected world with social media and the Internet, it's not like a deal breaker. It would help my career, I think a little bit, to be more in proximity to where a lot of the journalists and media outlets are. But we also have young kids, and so you try to balance everything as best you can. We're gonna ride it out through the end of this year through the election and then see what feels comfortable after that.
You’re in your fourth year independent now, so you’re up and running. You can take a vacation now, right? Maybe not so much with an election coming soon, but-
Sort of. I spoke at a conference in Italy in April, and so I went over there for a little over a week. It was a solo trip because they paid my way over there. I did manage to do that, but that was one of those deals where I basically did two weeks of work the week prior. The problem is that with my business model, having subscribers who are either monthly or annually, if you aren't publishing, it gives people a reason to unsubscribe. I do four newsletters a week and I still feel that obligation to have something four times a week.
So yes, I took a “week off”, but really that was just working two weeks of work the week prior before then. Talking with other people who do similar stuff, it's a constant struggle. I even feel bad these days with holidays, like I had forgotten when Memorial Day hit. It caught me off guard because the previous Friday I had told subscribers in my newsletter like, we'll be back with more on Monday. And then it dawned on me over the weekend like, oh, Monday's Memorial Day. I ended up doing a newsletter on Memorial Day.
Like I said, I'm still really glad that I went independent, and it has way more positives than negatives, but one of the negatives is it's difficult to take time off. Especially if I'm not publishing, that feels almost irresponsible. I don't doubt that that'll change over time, but you're also right that this year is probably not gonna be the year where that changes. Maybe next year, or if we get further in the future, if I can delegate more work, hopefully there'll be more opportunities and I'd love someday to do more trips with my kids and things like that.
So do you constantly feel pulled by work? Like, if you’re going to take three days off and decompress, go visit family, whatever, and then something happens in the news… are you able to let it sit there and not chase that bone all the time?
Sometimes I'm able to not chase it, depending on what's going on. I do a lot more long weekend trips, like a Friday and a Monday type thing rather than a week. Sometimes I won't even have my computer on me, I'll just bring my phone. And so then you're like incapacitated. I can do some work from my phone, but I'm not really going to be writing or doing in-depth stuff on Twitter from my phone. It depends on circumstances, but there is always that feeling of like, I mean, even tonight or tomorrow night (note: this interview took place 6/22/24), for instance, Trump is having a rally in Philadelphia, which is fascinating that he's doing a rally in a big blue city.
My wife and kids actually left yesterday to go to visit her family in Oregon, and my kids have never been in a plane before. I'm gonna go out next weekend to visit them, and then we're all gonna fly back together. But my mom and brother, who live around here, they have free tickets to the Minnesota Lynx game, and so they asked me, like, hey, do you wanna go to the game with us on Saturday? I'm gonna go and then I'll try and watch the rally later, but I'll certainly be feeling, as I get notifications on my phone, I'll be feeling that pull of, like, oh, man, like, I should really be covering this rally.
There's the other part of my brain that realizes that that's not really healthy. You have to take time off and take breaks and do fun stuff. I feel like I drive myself crazy, so I try to be responsible and practice some basic self-care. But especially in this campaign year that we're in, I mean there's stuff happening pretty much every single day and so you have to pick your spots. I don't let it get to a point where I'm gonna cancel plans to watch a Trump rally.
So when you go to the park, do you shut out all the noise and everything that you deal with every day for your job?
Pretty much. One of the things that I'm bad at, especially when I'm at home because I work independently, and because obviously covering politics is pretty totalizing, like my beat covering media and keeping tabs on what Republicans are up to on their TV channels and events and things like that, if I'm sitting around at home, I almost invariably get sucked into work unless we have like specific activities, like we have to give the kids a bath…
If I'm just lounging around the living room, I'm going to get drawn into work in some form or fashion. It's just really difficult for me because it's this gravitational pull of my computer screen. And so going to the ballpark, it's somewhere I can go and not be looking at my phone constantly and it's refreshing in that way. And it's just a way that I find some sort of balance in my life that I'm not just consumed by work all the time.
Even with having games on TV at home, you're still looking at a screen, but I'm not looking at my computer and thinking about if there are clips that are going on that are worth posting or tomorrow's newsletter, writing, editing. It's just a way to break up doing that all the time. Going to games, it's my main form of therapy in that way, just to have something different to do that isn’t work all the time.
I can tell he definitely knows his work-life balance is a little out of alignment right now. But then, as an independent journalist, it’s just like any solo job, like a real estate agent. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. And so you feel like every day off, and certainly every extended vacation, you just visualize people taking their dollars elsewhere. And having built a national audience, and getting exposure with doing TV segments as well, you get to the point where people want to see your coverage or your take on something. If you’re out of office, you might feel like you’re letting your audience down, or at least not giving them what they pay for.
I’m far from a workaholic, as any of my former coworkers can attest to, so I had to learn the other way. When I started writing more or doing photography as an income source, I had to realize that even though I’m not in an office 8-5 firing off emails and reports and meeting deadlines, I actually do need to be “working” even when I don’t have any immediate work to do. Whether that’s thinking of ideas, sending cold emails looking for work or interviews, or just honing your skills, I came to the realization that going it on your own is actually more work when you alone are the reason you succeed or fail. So while I sympathize with Aaron’s acknowledgment that he probably works too much, I also respect that mindset that got him to where he is today, which is a highly successful political journalist in a field that has many people battling for the limited dollars in the industry these days. Maybe when the Twins call up Brooks Lee and chase down the Guardians in a pennant race, he can kick back and watch at least an ALCS run this year.
I Was Asked to Explain my project
Are you putting together, it sounds like you're working on a book project?
Well, my idea was that as a country, we may only focus on our differences, but at our core we still share a lot of common values. The USA is really several different cultures all trying to work together, and my goal was to talk to people all over the nation and show that we have much more in common with each other than we think. So, using baseball, since every American has at least some exposure to baseball, I’ve found that people are more open to talking about their experiences and backgrounds when you ask them about baseball first, instead of their favorite foods, or football teams, or certainly not politics.
I think that's definitely true. One of my, he's more of an acquaintance than a friend, but I've got an acquaintance here who works in Republican politics, and he's as big of a sports fan as I am. He has Timberwolves season tickets. Whenever we run into each other, we usually don't talk politics, we usually talk about the local teams, something that we can relate to each other about and it doesn't devolve into the rancor about politics or arguing.
That was really true also in DC when the Nats had their World Series run. I remember I posted a tweet at one point, joking at that time, Senator Mitch McConnell had some sort of news conference that he did, and then he concluded by saying “Go Nats”, or something like that, wearing a Nationals cap. And it was one of those moments of like, you never have to hand it to him, but at least he's rooting for the good guys here.
I think you see that a lot of that when teams have a playoff run or are doing something exciting and it just gives people like a thing that they can all sort of share together. Up here in Minnesota, we've had many cycles now teams threatening to relocate. Go back to the North Stars, who did relocate, but then there was the Twins contraction and the Vikings possibly moving to Los Angeles, and the Wolves are in a stadium limbo right now, too.
I think that in a lot of those discussions about communities losing teams, or should we provide public subsidies for billionaires, and certainly I think there are really good arguments against doing that, but one of the things that you lose when you lose teams is that shared experience that people have or something that you can connect with other people in your community about.
I view sports that way, too. I think you're, like you said, with baseball being different, there's a certain conversational aspect to it given the pace of the game. I think it's part of the reason I like going with my wife on dates to games, because you go there, you might have some food, have a drink, sit there and chat and, especially if it's nice outside, it's just an overall pleasant experience. Then of course, the game is just gravy; if it's a good game, that's even better. Even when we take our kids and it's pretty hard to watch the game, I still just enjoy being at the ballpark.
How do you handle covering these Trump rallies where it feels like he literally only talks about the same things over and over and over again?
Especially since I've been watching these for so long, you're right that they're super repetitive. There's always news on the margins, though. He'll do little riffs that are off his teleprompter and put his foot in his mouth or tell some anecdote that comes out wrong and can make for a good clip. That's the lifeblood of my newsletter is I use social media to build my audience and then hopefully eventually get them to be newsletter subscribers. There's just value in being around to document stuff as it happens, because there's so many people doing clips now on social media. If you're not around to get a really good clip as it happens, someone else will, and then you're missing out on that aspect of building an audience.
I view it as covering the news, where Trump is part of my beat or if Biden is doing a speech, that's part of my beat. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's gonna be big news every speech, but you tune in and you see what happens. And if there is news, there's usually some bits of news in any Trump speech, even if they are super repetitive. They can be mind-numbing at this point in a way that they weren't when I first started doing this and everything was a little newer and I hadn't heard the same rants hundreds of times. But that's just a cost of doing business and that's part of my beat and any beat like that is gonna involve some drudgery and it's not always gonna be super exciting.
note: it’s 2024 and our political reporters have to cover a presidential candidate hypothetically choosing death by electrocution or by shark:
You're right that the rallies aren't as exciting as they were in 2015, 2016, 2017. But there's still enough going on there where, even if I'm not watching them live, in almost all cases, I'll at least watch them on delay cause part of what I do is the comprehensive… like I've been covering Trump now for nine years basically. I want to make sure that I know what's going on and that if there is something notable happening that I have awareness of it because that's part of what I do, not only on social media, but also as part of the newsletter coverage and more of the commentary and reporting that we have in the newsletter four times a week.
So what I said was that everybody has something in common with each other. But what do you see, or what have you seen, in covering the worst of one side of the country. Do you see anything that I mentioned where, I think even the most ideologically opposed people still have something in common as Americans… do you see that with the way everyone's being divided?
Yeah, I think that is true at a very basic level. One thing that's ironic about my situation here is that, we're living in my hometown, Forest Lake, which is like borderline exurbs, it's about 25 miles to Minneapolis from here. My community is like a very Trump, I think it was like 65% Trump voters in this town. When we go places here, and just having basic human interactions with people or other parents at daycare, things like that, you do notice that people are broadly good people and they have usually good moral values and treat people with respect.
I think it becomes easy to dehumanize people in the abstract. And we hear a lot of rhetoric, especially from Republicans, where it's like, we need to deport 20 million people. And that sounds OK, like, well, they crossed the border illegally, we can't be condoning criminals here. And it's like, OK, I get that, but then when you imagine what that's like in reality, and the members of your community who you might have very casual relationships with, but do you want to see raids come into your town with people being rounded up and deported? I think that it's very easy to dehumanize people or gin up hate against them when they're faceless abstractions. When it becomes more personified, then it can be eye opening.
We've had sort of an interesting thing here in this whole town, because it's a very blue collar, middle- to low-income community. But there's one homeless guy who is living downtown. He's been living downtown for months now. That's a very unusual thing in this town, and it's become a topic on the local Facebook page where people have bought him meals and someone bought him a tent. I've been enjoying following this on social media because people are being very nice to this guy and even someone struck up a conversation, got to know more about him and it's been heartening because this is a town that is very red. And had you told me a year ago we’d have a homeless person living downtown, I would think, oh, man, people are gonna be super mean about this, calling the cops on them, this and that. And it seems like it's been the opposite.
I just think that to the extent we can get out of our little silos and mix with people, I think most of the time you come away those from those experiences thinking that we have more in common than we don't. And I just wish people could carry that lesson forward a little bit more in their own personal politics. And so it is still distressing to me that like every election feels like everything is on the line and we're only one election away from losing our democracy, or not having free and fair elections anymore. And I think if people could carry their own personal values more into their voting decisions and the way they comport themselves as civic people who are voters in a society, I think we'd be better off for that. I think on a different level, I mean I do think sports is one of those ways we can breakthrough these like partisan feelings that we have and sort of connect on a different level with people. And so to the extent that baseball, or sports more broadly, can do that, I think that's a good and healthy thing.
Aaron does make a great point in that on an individual level, Americans are by and large friendly and good people to each other. Of course there’s dozens if not hundreds of social media viral clips proving otherwise, but that’s not what’s happening 99% of the time. But then you think about what people take to the voting booth: it’s never personal, they’re justifying their choices based on these abstract and unquantifiable things like migrant caravans (that mysteriously disappear after election day), crazy doctors murdering babies, fascist communist socialists on the PTA board… But then you get into the details and you learn that no, that’s not what’s really going on. If we just got back to working together, compromising, realizing that people generally have good hearts, and apply that to our government, which is made of American citizens… maybe we can start electing smart, reasonable, selfless people from both parties and start actually improving lives.
Or you can keep blaming your problems on illegal immigrants. See how much that improves your life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯