“Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning Born of the one light, Eden saw play Praise with elation, praise every morning God’s recreation of the new day.” — Cat Stevens/Eleanor Farjeon

Sometimes you need the lime wedge before you take the tequila shot. Sometimes you need it before, after, and then again a few minutes later. That happened when I stumbled upon a news story that a friend stumbled on yesterday. It seems someone in the Texas state legislature really doesn’t like transgender kids.

Of course, that’s not the way they would describe it. They would say they are looking out for children. The story in question references a bill that has been proposed before the state legislature. It seems they want to remove kids from their parents if they get a gender reassignment. They consider that tantamount to child abuse. See, I told you that you needed that lime wedge.

I can’t hardly decide where to begin on all of this. Should we take this on its merits or should we address the strategy behind it? The person (I’m not dignifying them by name) knows this has no chance in passing. So, why bother? Well, they are making a political statement and a social one as well. They also want to distract us from what is really going on in the legislature. They hope we will expend our energy defeating this monstrosity of a bill and ignore the real stuff they are trying to do.

Texas has done this for years. They take real issues like education, infrastructure, and the energy crisis and throw them on the backburner for wedge issues only a few care about deeply. Most of the time it is a bill allowing a three year old to bring a semi-automatic machine gun to daycare or having women that seek abortions drawn and quartered. You’ve seen them before. They are the type of bills that make you wonder if a majority of Texans are just stupid, mean, or if they are breathing at all.

However, this gets to the heart of what is inside the typical conservative. There isn’t much going on upstairs and what lies inside the chest is black indeed. I get the discomfort. We have a few students on campus that are transgender. It can be hard to deal with how you address them or what to talk about with them. I get discomfort on that level.

However, this is where the ignorance rolls in. Transgender people don’t go down to the local Walgreens, take a pill, and then become what they want. They don’t get cut from the basketball team, put on a dress, and then try out for the girl’s team. Yet, this is how this bill and others that have actually passed state legislatures seem to think about the process of reassigning your gender.

Parents aren’t demanding their kid change genders and they aren’t buying hormones on the street corner to get it done. This involves doctors, mental health professionals, and maybe church officials and pastors if they are religious. It involves deep reflection, soul searching, and numerous intermediate steps. Parents and children willing to go through with it deserve much more than what they are getting. It takes courage for a parent to let go of what they thought they had to allow their child to become the person they feel they need to become.

So, at the end of the day it is difficult to imagine what is more detestable in this case. Is the thought process itself the most obnoxious thing? Is the ignorance about the process of becoming transgender the most obnoxious thing? Is the hypocrisy of citing a loving and benevolent God while completely ignoring the love that he taught us to show the most obnoxious thing? It could be all of those, but it could be the simple truth that they want us talking about these things while they rob us blind behind our back.

Coming into yesterday I was lamenting the fact that I didn’t have much to write about. That’s always the kiss of death. There is an old Chinese proverb that says, “may you live in interesting times.” Well, there’s no denying that we live in interesting times. Two news stories intersected yesterday from different parts of the country.

Minnesota seems to be in the crosshairs again with another police shooting. This time, an officer says they were reaching for their taser and pulled out of their gun instead. I suppose it could happen to any of us if we were packing that much heat.

On the same day we had another school shooting make the national news. This leaves people like me to connect the dots. How are these events related? What if anything can be done to stop them? At the end of it all, most of us have that same powerless feeling you have when you see an accident happening in slow motion.

I suppose we can be thankful that there was only one victim in each case. However, I can’t help but think there is one unifying source to the problem. Guns. There are very few things that make me more angry. As a commentator, I get tired of commenting about it. We say the same things over and over again and nothing seems to change.

I think what’s more frustrating is the overarching attempts to be politically correct and accommodating of the gun owning population. I say I don’t want to take your guns. I say all I want is common sense gun control legislation. I say all I want are background checks and an automatic assault weapons ban. I say all of those things because I know the response I will inevitably get if I say something more. That ends today.

That’s not the truth though. I for one am sick and tired of hiding it. I’m tired of kowtowing to Rambo wannabes that seem to think they need to open carry their AR-15 to the florist so they safely buy flowers for their wife. I’m sick and tired of the dumb son of a bitch that thinks they need to carry their assault rifle into Wal-Mart because we need a good guy with a gun. I’m also tired of short-sighted legislatures that seem to think the answer is more open carry and fewer restrictions. I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I’m sick and tired of muting my own feelings because they aren’t politically popular. I hate guns. I have always hated guns and there is nothing that will change that. This isn’t assault rifles or automatic weapons. It’s not handguns. It’s not rifles and shotguns. It’s all guns. If every gun disappeared from the world I would be much happier.

I’ve never suggested banning guns or confiscating guns because I know it’s a non-starter. I also know plenty of people with guns that are responsible adults that wouldn’t be caught dead looking like that stupid Missouri couple. I also know that a part of this is driven on pure emotion. Sure, it worked in Australia, but I know these issues are much more complex than that.

I also know that situations like the Minnesota shooting are a lot more involved and a lot more needs to be said and done. I will say those things in due time. Others will too. For now, I just needed to come out and say it so I don’t have to hide it anymore. I hate guns.

Mike Pence just signed a double book deal with Simon and Schuster, announcing that the first one will be an autobiography.  The question is, who is going to want to read these?  MAGAites hate him and wanted to lynch him for not interfering in the certification of the electoral vote, and normal people think he’s a moron.

All we have to say is that this deal is going to generate a lot of toilet paper.

We always start with what we know. We know Matt Gaetz is guilty of something. We know that he played up the Q conspiracy on his own ends and for his own ends. We know that he is likely guilty of the same things that he was accusing others of doing. It makes no sense to write an entire post about these things we know. We already know it.

These things are troubling and yet it is not these things that trouble me. Eventually we get to the point where we recognize that evil exists in the world. We may even get to the point where we recognize evil in certain people before the world acknowledges it. In fact, psychologists tell us that most sexual assault victims had an uneasy feeling about their attacker  before the attack. For whatever reason, they chose to ignore that feeling. I can only assume that same intuition exists beyond immediate predators and those we just see on television.

The fact is that most people are better judges of character than what they think. Reports have come out now that even Republicans refused to have their picture taken with Gaetz. They knew something like this was coming. Of course, when he’s busy showing off naked pictures of girls he knows and playing Harry Potter inspired sex games then it isn’t difficult to see something horrible coming down the pike.

The question for today is how we teach all of our children these important life lessons. I promise we try to teach students about the importance of choosing good sources for information. I’ve sat in the room when teachers have gone over the difference between heavily biased sources and sources that are more reliable. I’ve watched as we have identified left leaning sources and right leaning sources. Wikipedia and YouTube were never suggested as reliable sources.

Yet, years later you see many of these same people quoting these same dubious sources when they talk about the widespread sex trafficking problem. Some of that is to be expected. I still remember getting my sources from the card catalog. Our English teachers made us write down the quotes from each source onto index cards and then wrote down all of the pertinent information about the source as well so we could build a bibliography from scratch. It’s easy to imagine people from this generation propagating crap from the internet.

Unfortunately, we are still far too busy teaching the STAAR test to spend time making sure kids understand the differences between biased and unbiased sources. In science classes we don’t spend nearly enough time helping students be on the lookout for junk science. Not enough students take basic statistics. Don’t even get me started on social studies and what we are doing in there. Yet, conservatives have the audacity to accuse of us indoctrinating students. Again, we accuse others of what we do ourselves.

The state curriculum is built on what the test tests for. The test doesn’t test students based on these skills. So, these skills only get taught if teachers are determined to teach it on their own. Many of the teachers I know do that, but I certainly can’t speak for everyone and I won’t even try to vouch for the majority. I can only hope each generation becomes more internet savvy than the last. Otherwise we are in a lot of trouble.

Written by Nick Carraway on April 1 – 

“Put me in coach. I’m ready to play today. Put me in coach, I’m ready to play today. Look at me. I can be centerfield.” — John Fogerty

Today marks a special day in American lore. It’s Opening Day. Opening day represents so many things for so many people. For some it is a signal of the beginning of spring. For others it is the renewal of hope that this year will be the year that everything goes right. Still others consider the routine of seeing box scores in the newspaper (or online) and a game on the tube (or radio) every single night. For many of us it is all of those things.

I’ve written four books about baseball and half of those have been related to the Hall of Fame. Independent of my love for the Astros or any other specific player there is the love for the game. Opening day should be a national holiday. When done right, nearly every team is opening their season on the same day. Fans can go into a collective coma with copious amounts of beer, peanuts, and other tasty treats seated in front of the television watching a triple header on ESPN.

I’ve spent all of those books talking about the history of the game and settling arguments within it, but I’ve rarely talked about why I love the game so much. For me, it brings order to disorder. There is a symbiotic relationship between cold, hard facts and the thrill of not quite knowing what will happen on any given day.

My cousin (an avid gambler) once asked me how you handicap baseball. I told him you don’t. You can look at pitching matchups, hitting lineups, career averages, and all kinds of numbers and lose every time. Yet, over a long enough timeline the numbers begin to level out and everything begins to make sense. That’s the paradox that brings you back every time.

Numbers fluctuate in every sport and yet the numbers in baseball have a magic all their own. The .300 batting average always means something. 100 runs and RBI always mean something. 20 wins, a 3.00 ERA, and 200 strikeouts always means something. Of course, those meanings become magnified when they turn into career sums. Then it becomes 3000 hits, 300 wins, 500 home runs, and so forth.

In no other sport are the numbers that magical. Running backs and receivers may gain 1000 yards and quarterbacks may throw for 4000 yards, but those numbers have waned in their importance over time. Offenses change and evolve. A yard just isn’t a yard anymore.

Similarly, in basketball scoring has changed dramatically as offenses have changed. The irony is that all three sports have embraced advanced analytics and the analytics have driven the strategy. Where did analytics get its start? You guessed it. Baseball.

I suppose it would be natural for a history buff to love baseball. The game goes back to the American Civil War. Football and basketball can’t possibly compete with that. Few really care about soccer in the United States and few south of the Mason-Dixon line care about hockey. So, baseball was the best opportunity to marry a love of statistics, history, and symmetry.

Today is a day to take a break from Matt Gaetz, Joe Biden, voter suppression, gun violence and anything else we might care about just about every day around here. It is a day to feverishly check the scores to see how my fantasy teams did. It is a day to marvel at individual performances that might or might not be a predictor of things to come. It is a day to hope that my team will be perfect for at least one day. It is a day to allow all of that other stuff to go far far away. It will all be here when we get back.