Where was I when the Cubs won. I was in Chicago. My home city.
I followed the Cubs my entire life… even though I spent most my childhood living in a small town in North Carolina. Far away from Chicago. But I loved the Cubs.
I loved them for two reasons.
Growing up, WGN was the only station that came in perfectly clear on the over-the-air TV signal at our house high up in the mountains of Appalachia, North Carolina, in a middle-of-no-where town. Before cable arrived, WGN was all that we watched.
But the more important reason was, that even though I had no memory of it, I was acutely aware from stories my parents told that I was born in Highland Park, Illinois, a close suburb of Chicago and that, before I was born, my family lived in Chicago for several years. They moved to North Carolina a year after I was born. But for that year, and every year after it, at least according to me, I was a true Chicagoan, now exiled from my home and forced to wonder the wasteland of America before being able to return to my rightful city, my true home, Chicago.
North Carolina was just a stopover.
Sure, I loved the mountains and the forests and all the beauty of nature that North Carolina had to offer. I loved my friends and family too and I loved my childhood. But, secretly somewhere deep inside, I loved Chicago and the Cubs more. Nothing made me happier than seeing the Cubs win.
And yet yesterday, as I watched them in the World Series from my couch in my west-side bungalow in my home city of Chicago as they won an improbable game seven in a way so unimaginably perfect it would make the worst kind of cheesy Hollywood movie ending, I suddenly felt a sense of fear. Something dastardly and subversive crawled its way into my consciousness in that moment.
A Nate Silver article I read a few days before when the Cubs were down 3 to 1 and all looked bleak.
Nate Silver, that bastard, claimed Donald Trump’s chances of beating Hillary Clinton were only slightly better than the Cubs winning the World Series. At the time, I thought that it was meant to be comforting, like as if to say, “don’t worry Trump can’t possible win, his chances are as low as the Cubs winning.”
I mean I got it. I’m a Cubs fan and they were predictably, almost obviously, crumbling at the brink of success. I was in familiar territory.
Both chances seemed dire indeed.
(But that was no reason to rub salt in the wounds, Nate.)
But it all changed so fast. And as I watched them win and I remembered that article, the terrifying clarity of its truth dawned on me.
Donald Trump actually has a chance to win the presidency.
If that thought is as terrifying to you as it is to me then VOTE.
If living in a country where political opponents are prosecuted and jailed scares you then VOTE.
If living in world where America closes its borders, expels all people it labels illegal and turns inward to feed on self-perpetuated half-truths and dishonest histories to suave its fear and hurt scares you then VOTE.
If you think both candidates are the same. You’re wrong. Accept that fact and then VOTE.
If you think they’re both crooks. You’re wrong. I know it’s hard to believe, but you are. Accept it and then VOTE.
More to come. But for now. VOTE and let’s have a woman run this county for a while.