A baseball movie. About a player dying and about how a team comes together when the players realize that one of their own is terminally ill.

Perhaps this is where we find ourselves as a country. A team of diverse individuals with a goal of coming together  to both support a dying friend and learning something about ourselves in the process. Of course, it’s just a movie…a sad one to be sure. The dying teammate is not intellectually gifted nor especially gifted as a player. Just a  human being who management decides is expendable and decides to trade him. A valuable team member decides to take up the dying man’s cause and declares, “if he goes, I go.”  That is loyalty. That is a higher purpose. That is what we are losing. It seems that we despise each other more than we care about the team. And that is a losing strategy no matter what game you play.

It seems that few things move us anymore. Game of Thrones ending got more of a gut reaction than any of the mass shootings have evoked across the population. If you prefer biblical reference, this could be Armageddon.

Around the globe, our adversaries believe we have it coming. They are tired of our smug bullshit democracy and what they view as our meddling. We do have a history of meddling to be sure, and more often than not it was in our self interest rather than for the good of another. We as a country felt no pain in removing Indians from their lands and effectively setting out upon genocide. We as a country felt no pain in enslaving dark skinned people. We as a country felt no pain at the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  We increasingly are becoming numb to death and despair unless it directly affects our lives individually.

Even post 911, we are incapable of holding out a hand, of feeling compassion for people enslaved or hungry or homeless or sick. We are so consumed with the noise and vitriol we do not hear our own cries for help. And it seems that a certain wing nut element in our society thinks, “we have it coming”. Increasingly the wing nuts look incredibly normal. But looks as we know can be deceiving.

As the 12 steppers might say, we have yet to hit bottom. Sometimes, the bottom is six feet deep.