AN ARTICLE FROM THE BASEBALL
MAGAZINE: JAN.
ONEMOREINNING
THE SILENT PROTEST
How
can I ignore Carlos Delgado? A baseball magazine deals with baseball matters
and that’s what One More Inning has done now for 15 years….but
how can I ignore Carlos Delgado? A part of me agonizes over what’s happening
to my country and so it’s
time now for me to speak out & take
a
lesson from a sports
figure who
has chosen to act on his
convictions.
His stance is not a popular
one with the fans and the players that surround him, but game after game
he sits down in protest to the war in Iraq & the use of his
homeland of Puerto Rico’s
Vieques Island as a weapons
testing ground for the United States.
There
are divisions in our country. I happen to believe we are in an ill fated
war which was wrong & which is draining our country economically &
destroying lives in an attempt to impose a political situation that may never
happen. Factional strife is just around the corner in Iraq and will
probably
come about whatever the results
of the upcoming election. For me the playing of, “God Bless
America”
during the seventh
inning at ballparks, symbolizes
support for a war that I find
to be intolerable & unjustified.
Here is
what Delgado
has to say about his
going to the
dugout and registering his right
to dissent:
“This is my personal feeling. I don’t want
to draw attention to myself. If
I make the last out of the seventh inning, I’ll stand there, but I’d
rather be in the dugout.”
“It’s a very terrible thing that happened
on September 11th. It’s (also) a terrible thing that happened
in Afghanistan and Iraq…I just feel so sad for the families that lost
relatives and loved ones in the war. But I think It’s the stupidest
war ever. We have more people dead now after the war than during the war.”
The questions for me regarding
the war are not easy ones. First and foremost would be should we have gone
to war in the first place….was there enough of a threat coming from
Iraq to justify invading the country. I believe that in light of the recent
findings in the just concluded congressional hearings, the threat was specious.
We are there though, so what do we do now. If we leave, my feelings are that
Iraq will face immanent terrorist threats and civil war. If we stay, the
signs are already there for civil war right now. When we first entered Iraq,
we were told we were doing so because Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction
and posed a treat to the security of the United States. We entered, none
were found and at that point the administration changed their tune and the
mantra had become that we were there to help Baghdad become free of tyranny
and a brutal dictatorship. It doesn’t work for me.
One More Inning & I stand behind
Delgado’s show of protest & feel it’s justified.
Herb Rogoff:One More Inning
