JackEngelhard
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No, Joe, we are not divided. Rise for the enduring power of baseball

Culture historian Jacques Barzun put it like this: “To know America, you must know baseball.”

Does Joe know?

Or is he too deep in the doldrums, and taking us there with him?

Joe takes a knee. Divisiveness. That’s his game...,He'd prefer to have American neighbor against neighbor.


The game endures during feasts and famines, war and peace, during the best of times and the worst of times, and as America waits to celebrate Aaron Judge’s next historic homerun, en route to surpassing Roger Maris, President Joe Biden is busy trashing the country, denouncing half of it as racist and “semi-fascist.”

No, Joe doesn’t know.

Joe takes a knee. Divisiveness. That’s his game.

But at 30 major league ballparks throughout the country, the rest of America rises for the national anthem and anticipates the call, “Batter up.”

We cheer. He jeers. He’d prefer to have America neighbor against neighbor.

Is it working? Yes, in universities and newsrooms where they keep trying to sell an American nightmare.

Not buying.

Americans, by a large margin, prefer the American Dream.

Thus, the ballparks are full to capacity, all cheering the home team, regardless of race, religion and politics.

“All races and religions, that’s America to me,” Sinatra sang in “The House I Live In,” as a summons to keep America united.

Not so in Joe’s White House.

Is Bryce Harper a Democrat or a Republican? Does anybody know? Does anybody care? The next homerun solves everything.

During the weekend’s remembrance of September 11, 2001, 21 years ago, the anger and the pain resurfaced. Proper respect was done, and baseball continued to be played.

So too football on Sunday.

Sports were the medicine.

Sometimes, a touchdown is all this nation wants and needs to keep its spirits up.

At the outset of WWII, many argued that major league baseball should be suspended. But FDR thought otherwise.

FDR advised Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to let the games proceed…for the sake of the nation’s morale.

For that same reason, baseball returned to New York City a week later, September 17, 2001, when the Mets played the Atlanta Braves at Shea Stadium.

From the dugouts to the bleachers, grown men wept at this first step toward normalcy. The Braves opened the game by hugging their New York rivals.

The highlight of the game was the Mets’ Mike Piazza’s two-run homer that won the game. The rousing cheers were a much-needed relief from so much pent-up sorrow.

Soon after, the third game of a World Series was on tap, and it went off while smoke was still in the air.

The game, at Yankee Stadium, was between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks, as told here masterfully.

President George W. Bush was to deliver the ceremonial first pitch, and he did, but with trepidation.

He knew he’d need to get it just right. Only a strike into the catcher’s mitt would do. A ball too high or too low would be deflating.

New York was watching. America was watching. The world was watching…and it was a strike.

At around the same time, horse-racing’s Breeders’ Cup was off and running at New York’s Belmont Park to show the world that America was down, but not out.

Today, no doubt about it, America is in the dumps. Only so, however, from an overdose of leftism. They cry racism and divisiveness.

But like the man said…There’s no crying in baseball.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com

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