Don't blame Trump for lack of historical perspective

You will never hear me say anything nice about Donald Trump.

It has nothing to do with politics. Trump has been a joke to me since I first heard of him more than 30 years ago. He has fewer human qualities than any human being I have ever known.

When he originally scheduled his Tulsa campaign rally for this Friday, folks were outraged that he scheduled it for Juneteenth, the day celebrating the end of chattel slavery in 1865.

They compared it to Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

Not much can save this year except baseball

I have long believed that the happiest memories of all are when wonderful things happen to people you love.

Most of the truly special days of my life have involved the people I love, just as some of the truly awful ones have been when bad things happen to the same people.

June 2010, Houston, Texas

But what about the great days that are just about experiencing things that make you happy? Those days matter too, even if we don't get to share them with anyone else at the time.

During seven decades on Earth, the people I love have mattered the most to me, and acquiring six grandchildren over the last 12 years has given me so much more to enjoy.

After people comes baseball. From my first double-header in 1957 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati to stadiums -- major and minor -- all over the country over the next 60 years, there are no bad times at baseball stadiums.

July 2010, Arlington,  Texas

Well, very few.

I wasn't that lucky when I went to the Rangers' ballpark in the summer of 2010. I got a great field box seat for $80. The rain was supposed to stop, but it didn't and I had to leave to drive back to San Antonio.

Well, at least I saw the ballpark.

Once we moved to Georgia later in 2010, I started doing something I really never thought I would do again -- I watched ballgames on television.

The last four years, I've bought the MLB.TV package so that I can watch Washington Nationals games. I have played Rotisserie Baseball every year since 1991 and a couple of years in the '80s before that.

Baby Shark and Clutch & Drive

The thing was, when baseball struck and cancelled the World Series in 1994, I was so angry with the ongoing games between player and owners that I promised myself if anything like that ever happened again, I would say goodbye to baseball for good.

Of course, I never expected that the previous season would conclude with one of the happiest moments of my life -- the Washington Nationals winning the World Series.

Almost as special as Virginia winning the NCAA men's basketball championship earlier the same year.

So a great year is followed by a ridiculously awful one -- my wife had major surgery for a life-threatening condition, my brother in law died after a long battle with cancer and a beloved fraternity brother died in his mid '50s.

In addition, Donald Trump is still president and there's been no baseball because the owners keep crapping around with the players.

2020, please get lost.

Next year had better be a lot better.

It's not enough not to teach children to hate

We Americans have always been good at teaching our children to hate.

We were settled by people who believed it was the duty of folks we later called WASPs to educate the other races and bring people with no religion (or maybe just the wrong religion) home to Jesus.

Some call slavery America's "original sin," but what we did to black Africans actually started after our genocide against native Americans. We take pride in religious freedom and say our country stems from a Judeo-Christian tradition, but countless German and European Jews died when Adolf Hitler was willing to let them leave because too many "good" American Christians thought we had too many Jews in this country already.

Half a century since a truly memorable time of life

The older I get, the more time's distances seem amazing to me.

I think it was Tennessee Williams in the wonderful "Glass Menagerie" who called time the longest distance between two points, and as I slip uncontrollably into old age I see how right he was.

Fifty years ago this spring was one of the happiest times of my life up to that time. Although I didn't really know it at the time, May 1970 marked the final weeks of my first real relationship.

It was about three weeks till the lovely Shelley Marcus would return home to Connecticut for the summer, and except for a strange week in September, that was it for us.

There are two things I remember vividly about that time.

First was Kent State. The killing of four antiwar protesters by the Ohio National Guard on the sunny Monday in Kent, Ohio, sent shock waves through our generation. And some of the responses around the country showed us that what was called the "Generation Gap" was maybe as wide as that big hole in the ground in Arizona.

"They got what they deserved."

"They should have killed 400 of them."

"Bums."