COMMENTARY | I was in a bar for Game 7 of the World Series years ago, in the hometown of one of the teams. I’ve never been a baseball person, but you couldn’t help but get swept up in the excitement. The patrons were all facing in a single direction, glued to the screens, cheering when appropriate, chatting only during commercials. And then came the key play, the play that clinched it.
For the other team.
Silence fell. En masse, people turned away from the televisions. Not a sound was heard as they wound up what they needed to wind up, and everyone filed out of the bar, no one looking at anyone else.
That’s how I imagine the Fox News viewership Tuesday night, after reading that viewers, by and large, turned off their televisions — or at least Fox News — after the announcement that President Barack Obama had won a second term. I see them silently filing out of their living rooms with a loss they didn’t think possible.
There has been a considerable amount of white whine made from freshly stomped sour grapes in the last few days. Bill O’Reilly bemoaned the loss of the “white establishment,” Ted Nugent blamed “Pimps whores & welfare brats,” and Twitter exploded with racist tweets.
One woman lost her job and got a visit from the Secret Service after expressing how she couldn’t believe that the “n” word was reelected and “Maybe he will get assassinated this term..!!” And on and on and on.
Turning off the TV doesn’t make change go away. Saying outrageous things as though they’re acceptable also doesn’t cause the tides of time to suddenly roll back. No matter how you address it, attack it, or try to avoid it, the outcome is the outcome.
The Right and Fox News created their own cozy little monochromatic world, where what they say goes, and it’s acceptable to, as Megyn Kelly put it, divide the world into real math and “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.” A world that is, unequivocally, their world. It belongs to them.
What you’re seeing is the shaking of the foundations of privilege, the belief that something is yours simply because it should be yours. With that idea, if you think it’s yours, then you also believe that others can “take it away.”
Or, in the case of this election and countless baseball games, have it taken away.
The truth is that it doesn’t have to be this way, not in politics. Not in day-to-day life, or in how we see or treat one another. Nothing is lost in seeing your fellow Americans as people rather than competitors for the power you think you own by birthright.
No doubt some of these self-same people looked at the Obama election night crowd and felt a twinge of fear or anger. Perhaps the diverse sea of faces made them uncomfortable; the map of tweets alone demonstrates that idea.
But when I looked at that room packed to the gills with every kind of American we have, I felt pride, joy, excitement. That is my America.
And it’s your America, as well. The series is over, but the pennant still stands.
