The Dodgers played the Yankees in the 1956 World Series, with victory claimed by the Yankees. The highlight of the Series occurred when Don Larsen threw a perfect game. I was in school, but the teacher let us listen on a scratchy AM radio, so I heard the ending innings of the perfect game in a late afternoon study hall. I remember the game’s being the center of conversation for the rest of the day and into the next. Even though both kids and adults play thousands of baseball games yearly, perfect games are rare events. Although pitchers begin a game with hopes of perfection, perfect games come unexpectedly. Larsen had pitched poorly in his previous Series outing.
I don’t remember whether or not I came down with the flu that year or the next. If I did get sick, I might have contracted the H2N2 flu that killed between 70,000 and 100,000 Americans. That flu might have killed up to four million worldwide, but “experts” believe that the 1956-1958 “Asian flu” deaths to have been in the neighborhood of two million plus. Compare that toll to the current 2.43 million who reportedly died from COVID-19 from late 2019 through early 2021.
In the course of human events, a single game, though memorable for fans of a sport, is insignificant. That I don’t remember the flu but remember that game probably says something about my age, interests, and mental maturity at the time. But no doubt many older fans remember that game, either because their team lost or because it won. Remembering the game and not remembering the flu might indicate something about the nature of the brain when bad events occur. Whatever is not personal is often meaningless. One might even argue that it is only that which is personal that is meaningful. Now, I’m not speaking of meaningful erudition. You might not think a collection of coccolithophores or conodonts has meaning, but a petroleum company’s micropaleontologist finds them meaningful because they can provide a moment of discovery and a doorway to wealth. Do you have a meaningful interest that disinterests others? I like the study of the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, but my interest is largely a detached “academic-like” interest in its meaning for the development of the country; reenactors probably empathize with the lives of those who fought there, making the battle more personal for them. The arrow of time imposes entropy on empathy unless we find a way to personalize the lives of others.
Whether or not someone has contracted COVID-19 has become one of those meaningful personal matters. With incessant negative news, the disease rose to the forefront and plunged into the emotional innards of human brains around the world, much more so than the H2N2 of the late 1950s. Yes, people were connected at that time by newspapers, radio, and evening TV news, but not to the degree provided by the ubiquitous media of the 21st century. And a worldwide emphasis on washing hands and wearing masks coupled with government-imposed cancellations of “normality” has made COVID-19 personal for just about everyone, including those who are now at the age that I was in the 1950s. Kids know there’s a disease out there. Kids related to the hundreds of thousands whom the disease killed are especially aware. But in the spring of 2020, thousands of college-age kids went to beaches and parties during Spring Break, mostly without considering the disease to be personally meaningful—until some of them contracted the disease.
There’s something in humanity that drives hope in a time of despair and overshadows reality with detached unreality. In that detachment the mind seeks distraction from suffering and hopelessness. Too much empathizing is hard on the psyche. Intellectually, almost everyone knows that some people live without a chance for better times as uncounted millions do. And among those uncounted millions is an unknown number of survivors, people who endure regardless of their dire circumstances. But even in an age of instant worldwide reports, chance ignorance or purposeful dismissal of the circumstances of others prevails. It is difficult to personalize the unseen suffering of those in distant places. We know by experience that even with knowledge of suffering, people exhibit various degrees of empathy. We don’t equitably share care.
As a young teenager in a time when news wasn’t 24/7, I probably had no idea that two million people—or more—were dying from H2N2. Without that knowledge, I had no motivation to empathize. Knowing, however, would not necessarily have made me empathetic to their plight unless I could have personalized it. Since I can’t remember any family doctor telling me that I had H2N2, I cannot remember the pandemic except as a matter learned after its occurrence and in my adulthood, too late for empathy.
I suppose the same can be said for any generation for whom suffering isn’t personal. Can Berliners or New Yorkers understand the suffering of the destitute in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where murder and rape, starvation, disease, and political and industrial corruption coupled with intrusive foreign interests have been commonplace for decades? If you live outside equatorial Africa, are you aware of those who seem to have no escape from Man’s inhumanity to Man in a country fraught with tribal warfare and murderers and slavers who act without compunction?
But what is one to answer to such a question? The world is big, too big for any one person, even the most travelled among us, to comprehend all at once. And even when anyone does delve into the suffering of others, the effort and the empathy are limited by the ability to withstand the stress of overwhelming despair. We can personalize the suffering of one or a few. But hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Can we empathize without personally suffering? Isn’t that the reason playwrights insert some little comic relief into their tragedies? Too much despair makes one numb, as I assume many in the DRC have become in a vale of hopelessness. Yet, even in that particular vale of tears in what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness, children continue to play and lovers continue to love. And when they are not under personal attack, people in that “darkness” continue to sing and dance to soukous.
Maybe I was aware of the H2N2 pandemic back then. I can’t say. If I had been aware, then my memory of Don Larsen’s perfect game makes sense. It was a “comic relief,” a lift from depths. I can think of parallels, of radio shows and life “as usual” going on for millions during the death and destruction of World War II, for example, or for millions during the democides by socialist, fascist, and communist governments during the twentieth century. In a world of uncountable tragedies, comic relief is a mechanism for sanity and a glimmer, as we say, of hope.
But hope for what? The answer, I think is for at least temporary perfection, a moment in some Garden of Eden before the Fall. Sure, all such moments are brief. We rejoice in them, nevertheless, because we know they come in the context of a human constant, the ever-present suffering the world imposes on millions at any one time. Just two weeks after Don Larsen threw that perfect game, the Hungarian Uprising led to a two-month period in which 700 Soviet troops and 2,500 Hungarians died in a civil unrest that precipitated an exodus of 200,000 refugees. Life was turmoil in Hungary while Yankee fans celebrated their victory.
A perfect baseball game is a reminder that perfection, though incredibly rare and never lasting, is possible, and that a world with so many despairing people can occasionally provide one brief glimmer of hope. People still find time to love others and to strive toward some goal. The brain still finds temporary relief as the human spirit continuously seeks that perfect game.
I don’t remember whether or not I came down with the flu that year or the next. If I did get sick, I might have contracted the H2N2 flu that killed between 70,000 and 100,000 Americans. That flu might have killed up to four million worldwide, but “experts” believe that the 1956-1958 “Asian flu” deaths to have been in the neighborhood of two million plus. Compare that toll to the current 2.43 million who reportedly died from COVID-19 from late 2019 through early 2021.
In the course of human events, a single game, though memorable for fans of a sport, is insignificant. That I don’t remember the flu but remember that game probably says something about my age, interests, and mental maturity at the time. But no doubt many older fans remember that game, either because their team lost or because it won. Remembering the game and not remembering the flu might indicate something about the nature of the brain when bad events occur. Whatever is not personal is often meaningless. One might even argue that it is only that which is personal that is meaningful. Now, I’m not speaking of meaningful erudition. You might not think a collection of coccolithophores or conodonts has meaning, but a petroleum company’s micropaleontologist finds them meaningful because they can provide a moment of discovery and a doorway to wealth. Do you have a meaningful interest that disinterests others? I like the study of the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, but my interest is largely a detached “academic-like” interest in its meaning for the development of the country; reenactors probably empathize with the lives of those who fought there, making the battle more personal for them. The arrow of time imposes entropy on empathy unless we find a way to personalize the lives of others.
Whether or not someone has contracted COVID-19 has become one of those meaningful personal matters. With incessant negative news, the disease rose to the forefront and plunged into the emotional innards of human brains around the world, much more so than the H2N2 of the late 1950s. Yes, people were connected at that time by newspapers, radio, and evening TV news, but not to the degree provided by the ubiquitous media of the 21st century. And a worldwide emphasis on washing hands and wearing masks coupled with government-imposed cancellations of “normality” has made COVID-19 personal for just about everyone, including those who are now at the age that I was in the 1950s. Kids know there’s a disease out there. Kids related to the hundreds of thousands whom the disease killed are especially aware. But in the spring of 2020, thousands of college-age kids went to beaches and parties during Spring Break, mostly without considering the disease to be personally meaningful—until some of them contracted the disease.
There’s something in humanity that drives hope in a time of despair and overshadows reality with detached unreality. In that detachment the mind seeks distraction from suffering and hopelessness. Too much empathizing is hard on the psyche. Intellectually, almost everyone knows that some people live without a chance for better times as uncounted millions do. And among those uncounted millions is an unknown number of survivors, people who endure regardless of their dire circumstances. But even in an age of instant worldwide reports, chance ignorance or purposeful dismissal of the circumstances of others prevails. It is difficult to personalize the unseen suffering of those in distant places. We know by experience that even with knowledge of suffering, people exhibit various degrees of empathy. We don’t equitably share care.
As a young teenager in a time when news wasn’t 24/7, I probably had no idea that two million people—or more—were dying from H2N2. Without that knowledge, I had no motivation to empathize. Knowing, however, would not necessarily have made me empathetic to their plight unless I could have personalized it. Since I can’t remember any family doctor telling me that I had H2N2, I cannot remember the pandemic except as a matter learned after its occurrence and in my adulthood, too late for empathy.
I suppose the same can be said for any generation for whom suffering isn’t personal. Can Berliners or New Yorkers understand the suffering of the destitute in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where murder and rape, starvation, disease, and political and industrial corruption coupled with intrusive foreign interests have been commonplace for decades? If you live outside equatorial Africa, are you aware of those who seem to have no escape from Man’s inhumanity to Man in a country fraught with tribal warfare and murderers and slavers who act without compunction?
But what is one to answer to such a question? The world is big, too big for any one person, even the most travelled among us, to comprehend all at once. And even when anyone does delve into the suffering of others, the effort and the empathy are limited by the ability to withstand the stress of overwhelming despair. We can personalize the suffering of one or a few. But hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Can we empathize without personally suffering? Isn’t that the reason playwrights insert some little comic relief into their tragedies? Too much despair makes one numb, as I assume many in the DRC have become in a vale of hopelessness. Yet, even in that particular vale of tears in what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness, children continue to play and lovers continue to love. And when they are not under personal attack, people in that “darkness” continue to sing and dance to soukous.
Maybe I was aware of the H2N2 pandemic back then. I can’t say. If I had been aware, then my memory of Don Larsen’s perfect game makes sense. It was a “comic relief,” a lift from depths. I can think of parallels, of radio shows and life “as usual” going on for millions during the death and destruction of World War II, for example, or for millions during the democides by socialist, fascist, and communist governments during the twentieth century. In a world of uncountable tragedies, comic relief is a mechanism for sanity and a glimmer, as we say, of hope.
But hope for what? The answer, I think is for at least temporary perfection, a moment in some Garden of Eden before the Fall. Sure, all such moments are brief. We rejoice in them, nevertheless, because we know they come in the context of a human constant, the ever-present suffering the world imposes on millions at any one time. Just two weeks after Don Larsen threw that perfect game, the Hungarian Uprising led to a two-month period in which 700 Soviet troops and 2,500 Hungarians died in a civil unrest that precipitated an exodus of 200,000 refugees. Life was turmoil in Hungary while Yankee fans celebrated their victory.
A perfect baseball game is a reminder that perfection, though incredibly rare and never lasting, is possible, and that a world with so many despairing people can occasionally provide one brief glimmer of hope. People still find time to love others and to strive toward some goal. The brain still finds temporary relief as the human spirit continuously seeks that perfect game.
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