This column, like others, has recurring themes. One of them is the difficulty of being a Little League umpire or youth sports official due to the increasing abuse from parents, some of whom can be violent. Last year, a column titled “Punching the Ump, &c.” linked to a news report that said officials were fleeing youth sports due to the abuse.
In 2014, the author wrote a piece about policing called “A Job Like No Other” in which they umpired a baseball game and gained greater sympathy for referees and umpires. The author suggested that athletes and fans should ump or ref to become less judgmental. Recently, a youth baseball league sentenced fans who mistreated umpires to do the job themselves, a move the author supports.
The Turkish government has an agency called the “Office for Human Abductions and Executions,” which kidnaps Turkish critics in exile and forces them to face prison or death. The world has let the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan get away with a lot, including being the largest jailer of journalists in the world. Erdoğan has staged sham referendums and elections, and only Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has congratulated him on it. The author hopes that the US’s decision to rejoin UNESCO and pay back dues will counter Chinese influence.
The author believes that taking a Confederate general’s name off a US military base and renaming it “Liberty” is not politically correct but morally sound and American. The Confederacy stood for the preservation of slavery, and there is no need to honor them in the names of US military bases. The author hopes that the new cause of restoring the names of Confederate generals to US military bases is a lost cause.
In other news, Louisiana Army base was renamed after World War I Harlem Hellfighter, and Michael Bloomberg gave $130 million to an arts center in New York, saying “I can afford it, and they need the money.” The author shares some beautiful Chicago scenes, including the Buckingham Fountain, the Art Institute, and the Shedd Aquarium, and encourages readers to have a beautiful week.
