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
>