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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (May 4, 1999)
he Battalion O PINION Page 19 • Tuesday, May 4, 1999 ake me out of the ballgame 'al Ripken Jr. should retire while legacy is still strong for sake of fans, his failing health ■pon the retire ment of Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox ■, the author John fxlike wrote, “Gods i not answer let- Mark PASSWATERS R/ltuB.- sstore 1 ;rsityol it April f six si; iree do A&M eenou as (AP -for-5' a two- kings; What was true in 60 is probably true years late but, pefully, Gods do read letters. I How does someone tell a hero that their time on the stage is near comple tion? I It is time for Cal Ripken to retire. Not at: the end of this baseball season — now. I Ripken is one of the most recognizable Runes in American popular culture, one oj those athletes who can be recognized b. sed on his first name alone. I Like “Michael” or “Sammy,” Ripken has played the game of baseball with dig- ■ty and class. Starting on May 6, 1982, and continuing for 2,632 contests, Cal ■pken has been in the Baltimore Ori- o es’ starting lineup. I During “The Streak,” a span of 16 ytars, Ripken hit more home runs than any other shortstop in history, won two ■old Gloves for outstanding defense, started 13 straight All-Star Games and ■on two American League Most Valuable PLyer awards. ■ But there were losses. ■ He lost his hair from worrying about an often poor ballclub. His team lost 21 sp/ght games at the start of the 1988 istason. And he lost his father to cancer l tlis spring. ■ Through all of this, Ripken kept his head up and his back straight, because tlat is what he was taught to do. I But now Ripken is on the disabled list, ps back has finally failed him; a nerve problem has left him unable to play. This season, Vus average sits at a weak i?9 and he has made 5 errors — 2 more an he made during the entire 1992 sea son. Ripken is now 38, and the body of the “Iron Man” is not healing like it used to. As a result, he has been diminished to a shadow of his former self. Hang ’em up. Cal. You’ve got nothing left to prove. Many athletes have tried to continue playing after their time was up. Ripken’s own role model. Brooks Robinson, tried to keep playing after his abilities were di minished. Two of Ripken’s teammates, Eddie Murray and Jim Palmer, damaged their great legacies by trying for a few more wins or a few more hits. Willie Mays, Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver and even Babe Ruth tried the same approach. It is time for Cal Ripken to retire. Not at the end of this baseball season — now. To the fans of these players, especially to the young ones, this must have been difficult — their heroes were not invinci ble; the time to stop had come. As the players grew older, so did their fans. Then, when it was all said and done, both the player and fan said, “Where did the time go?” Now I know how they feel. 1 started following baseball in 1982, when the rookie Cal Ripken won the American League Rookie of the Year. I have rooted for the Orioles ever since. Many a hot hu mid summer’s night was made bearable by hearing Jon Miller, the Orioles’ radio announcer, say “Well, here comes Cal ...” and hearing the Public Address announc er at Memorial Stadium intone that the next hitter was “The Shortstop, Number 8, Cal Ripken...” All of that is gone now. Jon Miller no longer works for the Orioles and Memori al Stadium has been torn down. Gone with them is that little kid who sat and listened, hoping that Cal would come through just one more time. That child from Virginia is now in Texas, out of radio range. Small worries have been replaced by bigger ones, ones about the future that once seemed so far away — back when Cal Ripken was the best player in the game. One of the most difficult things for any human being is to accept when the time for things has come and gone. See ing Cal Ripken on the field now, strug gling to do what he once did so easily, is painful to watch. There are few personal goals left, and it is not like the current Orioles team is World Series bound. In fact, they are a disgrace. They do not play with any hustle, nor do they play as a team. Ripken has al ways given his best and has always played for the team. Cal Ripken has always brought a cer tain element of class to the game of base ball every time he has stepped on the field. The way he handled himself made him an inspiration, a true role model. Walking away from baseball now would once again show his grace and dignity. Showing that he can accept that he has lost his youth, no matter how hard it is, would be just as inspiring as anything he has ever done. Maybe it would help some of us to do the same. Thanks, Cal. For everything. Mark Passwaters is a graduate electrical engineering student. ROBERT HYNECEK/The Battalion ALOMAR Mar. teace in Kosovo as important as healing in Colorado community /man starter In im Thoi r -i- < Caleb MCDANIEL wo weeks ago, American news cameras turned lines, aMeir attention from DSOVO tO won t alumbine, and a owingWieving nation began — and:® pour out its sym- ,11 then/ftthies to the suffer- ling, aiding families in Col- s throwjado. Meanwhile, lejamwlorlds away, other families grieved over ille deaths of innocent Albanian minimlfugees killed in an accidental NATO at- mingsatalck on a farm vehicle convoy in Koso- t get anvo. last sMy' Despite the fact that both senseless ' Bts of violence were equally tragic and been 0- destructive, Americans have expended riday,:enormous amounts of energy in mourn- ne tlieflmo q Ae (alien high school students while e seasonB e y i iave barely batted an eye about the cappi't-pjvilian victims of NATO bombings, ke Morgl There is no excuse for this inattention of public opinion to the casualties in Kosovo in the wake of the killings in Columbine. Americans cannot be lured into thinking that one tragedy was more terrible than the other — the human blood shed in both places has been wasted by violent attack. In both cases, the victims were un prepared for the sudden attacks. In both cases, the victims were noncombatants who were not supposed to die. In Koso vo as well as Colorado, lives were abruptly brought to an end, leaving loved ones to grieve for the loss. There was, of course, one important difference between the two killings: The one at Columbine High School was in tentional, and the one on the Kosovar convoy was not. However, this fact does not make one group of deaths more grievous than the other. The victim of an unintentional at tack is just as dead as the victim of an intentional one. The deaths of the Koso vars was just as horrible as the deaths of the Colorado students. In fact, the total number of innocent civilians killed by NATO air strikes has now doubled the death toll at Columbine High School, following the announcement earlier last week that a stray bomb hit a residential area in Yu goslavia. Yet these who have died are not fea tured in American news stories or given coverage of each of their individual fu nerals. The most anyone has heard about the civilian deaths in Yugoslavia and Kosovo amount to hasty half-apolo gies from NATO’s military spokesperson. Why have these fallen not received our attention? If Americans say it is because they are not American, we are being cruelly insen sitive. A human life is worth just as much whether it was born under the Stars and Stripes or under a foreign flag. America is, after all, the nation founded on the idea that “all men are created equal.” If Americans are less concerned about the civilian deaths because some of them are Yugoslavians and therefore enemies by association, they are making a horrible generalization. It is no more true that every Serbian is a Slobodan Milosevic than that every American is a Dylan Klebold. Perhaps Americans merely accept that these deaths were the unfortunate but inevitable byproducts of war, but that is precisely what they cannot ac cept. Even our officials have tried to ob scure the death of noncombatants as something other than what it is. We la bel fallen civilians with sterile names like “collateral damage,” forgetting by and by that these too were ruined lives. We have been moved by the tragedy in Littleton and rightly so. The massacre at Columbine High School never should have happened and we must go to great lengths to ensure that it never happens again. But the massacres of noncombatants in Kosovo should not have happened ei ther, and America must expend just as much energy in efforts to prevent them from happening again. Ultimately, the only way to do that is to wage peace with as much fervor as we have been waging war. Bringing an end to the war in the Balkans is the only sure way to keep more unfortunate acci dents from occurring. If America would work as hard for peace in Kosovo as it is working for heal ing at Columbine, our grief would truly be genuine instead of appearing selec tive. If Americans would deplore all vio lence as much as they hate the violence in Colorado, then they might sincerely say that they are deeply wounded when any one of our fellow humans dies. Caleb McDaniel is a sophomore history major. Differences between individuals contribute to society, people should not fear sharing personal information TANFORD, Calif. (U-WIRE)— I had ^ an interesting revelation in a history J section at the end of last week. In discussing the “double conscious- °ss” of minorities in America posited by l.E.B. DuBois, my teaching assistant unched into a story of her childhood in ftxas, taking us into a child’s experience of racial difference. She had known the “twoness” of a vis- le and unbroachable difference in iden- y, external perception conflicting with internal sense of self. More interesting than the actual story was the reaction of the class. I We looked at our hands, flipped through our books and smiled awkward ly, worrying that we might be expected to share, cringing a bit when she looked at up expectantly. Capable of speaking co herently about abstractions of American racial dilemmas, we were stuck when it became apparent that these abstract themes might be likened to our own lives. ■ We self-effacingly think that nothing so serious could have really touched us, or if so, it is not worth telling or hearing. In part, the tangible reluctance may have been the result of an actual lack of experi ence in difference and rejection. I It is also a little embarrassing to hear someone’s story unsolicited — we remain strangers to most of our peers in spite of the connections that could make our lives whole. I would like to think, though, that our reluctance was less a result of our ho mogenous makeup or of rejection than of a fear of disclosure. Such fear is what compels us to tell anecdotes rather than stories, to keep our interactions brief amidst the ever-quick ening pace of a sound-bite society. Im plicit is a fear of rejection, indifference — in short, looking stupid in front of multi ple people, not being entertaining or co herent. It is a well-founded fear. Humans are cruel beasts, sometimes unintentionally, and the deviation in levels of understand ing from one person to the next are enough to dizzy the most apt psycholo gist. We do not always make sense to each other, and there are times when we come to the most frustrating, painful and ap parently most unavoidable collision of minds and emotions conceivable. We get gun-shy, either from the behavior of a particularly abrasive professor (when a simple “no” would suffice), the razor wit of an unaware housemate or the polite in difference of the person you’ve given your heart to. And so, understandably, we remain veiled from the relative lack of genuine ness that being afraid in such a way leaves in our wake. Better to stay out of the water than end up freezing cold. Eyes closed to potential connections, we fum ble through our days ... but to what end? If we were all Care Bears and loved each other to oblivion and had no need for sarcasm, we would probably be dis closing all over the place, and our interac tions would be candy-coated and sweetly sickening. Yuck. If we were all edgy and relied on bril liantly biting sarcasm as the lone vehicle for our wit and ingenuity, we would end up vacating campus in a mass exodus for the East Coast where we could wear lots of black and drink coffee and yell at taxi cabs. Double yuck. We cannot satisfy the human desire for challenge, argument, compassion, au thenticity, by becoming pastel stuffed ani mals or New Yorkers. We likewise cannot learn to appreciate genuine sincerity by telling our comrades in a steady unrepen tant stream everything from the play-by- play of senior prom to how we learned to ride a bike or how often we have sex. An increase in information alone will do us no good. But to increase the opening in the old creaky door which stands at the en trance to our minds, with potential to be so open — to let some more light in — could give us the chance to grow. But we also cannot expect to be perpetually deep. Sometimes you just need the breezi ness and melodrama of a soap opera in your life. And it’s not that being either to tally lovey or sarcastic are necessarily bad. It’s just when those two ways of car rying oneself through a conversation be come so overpowering as to prevent any other element of emotionality from breaching the gap between people, some thing is lost. We stop hearing each other. Hopefully we remain real to a few friends and ac quaintances, family members, people whose history with or commitment to us does not allow for a casual complacency. It’s a dilemma, how much to give, how to dispense with the fear and doubt which keep us distant, how not to be annoying. Stay grounded, keep your ego in check? Or let go, lose yourself in living? Infinite possibility relies upon some dis closure. Speak. Someone will hear you. Mari Webel is a columnist for the Stanford Daily. MAIL CALL Corps provides morality, strength In response to Jasdn Starch’s Apr. 28 opinion column: It is about time that somebody has finally told it like it is. The large majority of student who attend Texas A&M in pursuit of a quality degree so that they may earn a suc cessful and fulfilling career should drop on their knees and praise the true heroes of our campus, the Corps of Cadets. It is only these students that know that we should be proud of our awesome military heritage and know that we would not be the proud nation we are today without our military victories. The rest of us should be ashamed our ourselves for taking advantage of the freedom that our fathers and grandfathers provided and choosing to use our abilities for fields such as medicine, law, engi neering and business. The traditional values that made this nation strong are fading, and it is not through religion or truth or good parenting that we will resolve our moral slide. The only answer is the military. Ross Macha Class of '99 >