Sometimes I go for weeks without posting a single blog entry not because I have no ideas, but because I don’t have the mental focus to sort through the constant bombardment of stimuli and narrow my subject down enough to muster a coherent set of thoughts that haven’t already been expressed all over the blogosphere by the time I get around to it.
Certainly there’s been no shortage of right-wing dishonesty, propaganda, and inhumanity to rant about in the last few weeks – but hey, at least the Iran invasion hasn’t started yet. On the closely related religious-nutjob front, there’s been plenty to talk about as well: the latest mega-church sex scandal, the creationist Discovery Institute’s plagiarism (with the science removed, of course), the Saudi gang-rape victim who got 200 lashes for riding in a car with a man who was not a relative, the teacher arrested for naming a teddy bear Muhammed, the sisters who murdered their own uncle and his wife in front of their chilldren because the couple’s wearing of “western style trousers” showed they were infidels… I could go on, but it’s late and I need sleep, and lots of it, in the 5 and half or so hours left before my alarm goes off.
So anyway, tonight I’m siting around wandering the InterTubes instead of catching up on any of many non-web-surfing tasks I should have been working on. I’m idly thinking, “I need a blog post subject… but what? So much to choose from!”
Then I come across a DIGG link to a baseball video from earlier this summer, and I know I’ve found my subject. Its one of those moments that reminds me that despite a world filled with examples of man’s inhumanity to man (not to mention just plain old-fashioned stupidity) that we as a species do in fact have some redeeming qualities, and that sometimes even large masses of humanity have it in them to collectively Do The Right Thing.
This summer an autistic man sang the national anthem at Fenway Park. Partway through the song he started to become overwhelmed by the attention and slipped into a nervous sort of stutter-laugh reaction. Now, in most sports venues I’ve been to (especially those in a neighboring city, which shall remain nameless, where even victory celebrations sometimes end in car fires in the parking lot), I would expect nothing less than a chorus of boos and “throw da bum out!” calls.
Not so on this day in July at Fenway Park. They cheered him on! When that didn’t work and his voice didn’t steady, they started to sing along with him.
Wow.
Oh, and I’ll add something I find uplifting in a totally different way. The normally detestable “LOLCATS” phenomenon has collided with SF writer John Scalzi’s Creation Museum report to produce the peanut butter cup of hilarity that is LOLCreashun.
