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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Evolution

It’s Been A While Since I’ve Been a Sports “Fan”

03 Thursday May 2018

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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DC, Disillusionment, DMV, Escapism, Evolution, Fandom, Misogyny, Narcissism, Pitt, Politics and Sports, Racism, Sports


Cropped image of seven year-old Linus Van Pelt sucking his thumb and holding his security blanket (like the average American sports fan), May 3, 2018. (http://amazon.com).

If my 25 year-old self and my 48 year-old self met in the same hotel bar on Rolling Rock Beer and Wings night in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, or Cleveland, they would have so much in common (or explode space-time). But they would have one hell of a disagreement about the quality, purpose, and feeling of being a sports fanatic. We’d both be ex-baseball fans, courtesy of the sports’ over-inflated view of itself, its long history of racism, exclusion, and paternalism, and George Will’s ludicrous books on America’s so-called pastime. We’d both watch NBA basketball, NHL hockey, a fútbol match or a tennis tournament or a golf major here and there. But the reasons for watching, the rationale for whom to root for and why, the purpose for either of us to indulge in such athletic delights? We would be at an obtuse angle, at least 120 degrees apart.

My history of sports fandom began pretty much in middle school, even though I’d been exposed to all of New York’s underdog teams from the womb. Mets, Jets, and Knicks (Mom still doesn’t watch or understand hockey, by the way) were her teams by the time she and my dad conceived me. But me being me, I reinvented the wheel between the end of ’81 and the spring of ’84. I watched/listened to Yankees and Mets games, as well as the Knicks and Nets, the Islanders, Rangers, and Devils, and the Jets and Giants.

I picked my childhood teams based on low expectations, the balance between them being underdogs and being doormats, the players I’d most likely would want to emulate if I ever wanted to be a professional athlete. And, mostly important, based on that team’s ability to help me forget about all that was wrong in my world, for at least three hours per day (in baseball), or six hours a week (between the other sports combined).

The Mookie Wilson-Bill Buckner connection, Game 6, 1986 World Series, Bottom 10th, Shea Stadium, Queens, NY, October 25, 1986. (http://halloffamememorabilia.net).

That gradually began to change once my teams started winning championships, or at least, regularly competing for them. The change accelerated once I left the New York area for Pittsburgh and its Western Pennsylvania ways. Between my Mets winning a World Series and my Giants winning two Super Bowls between ’86 and ’91, I found myself no longer a fan of hometown underdog teams. Sports weren’t an escape from my reality anymore. Especially as I began regularly working out and playing sports myself.

But I still saw sports fandom as a good thing, something that could unite people and cross the barriers of racism, classism, and even sexism (depending on the sport). That was my next phase of fandom, beginning around ’93. This view was what fueled my divorce from baseball after the ’94 MLB strike and lockout, and what caused me to begin watching more golf and international soccer, and not just falling asleep to it.

I still rooted for my Giants, Rangers, and especially the Knickerbockers. Too bad only the Rangers broke through in the ’90s, although the Knicks had their chances between ’93 and ’99. With living in Pittsburgh, though, I also began to cheer for the Steelers, the Penguins (except when they played the Rangers), and sometimes the Pirates.

But even in this phase of my fandom, I recognized the basic truth. I was cheering for athletes and their talent and will to shine in competition. That they happened to be a linebacker for the Giants or a pitcher for the Mets was a bonus, but I would’ve enjoyed their talent on other teams and in other athletic contexts anyway. I recognized this already with Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield in the ’80s, and I saw another glimpse of it in ’96, when Dwight Gooden, at this point with the Yankees, finally threw a no-hitter. I wasn’t even a baseball fan anymore, but I was so happy for the diminished Gooden to achieve this feat.

Venus hitting a backhand against Elise Mertens in 1st round of Wimbledon, Wimbledon, England, UK, July 3, 2017. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/; John Walton/PA).

I think that’s why I started rooting for Venus (who does not get nearly enough credit for being an elite athlete and tennis player) and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, and so many others while they were still in their teens. I’m sure that’s why I stopped putting up with cockamamie excuses from other fans about too much money in professional sports, about free agency, about the difficulties of running a franchise, when I’d see the same teams losing year after year. It didn’t help that the athletes I rooted for growing up or in the ’90s began to retire, often with a vocal and unappreciative fan base trying to shove them out to door.

Most importantly, I saw the greed and narcissism and conservative politics and racism and misogyny and homophobia that is embedded in the ownership of teams and in the building of franchises. That sports are no more divorced from the politics and malignancies in society than our choices in food and clothing, or the decision of most Americans to berate the poor for their poverty. That sports teams and franchises are about as “clean” and “merit-based” as legacies in college admissions (the ultimate form of affirmative action) and the American election process at any and all levels. Despite this, a hundred million people still entertain this naive view that sports fandom is an essential good, a form of escape, a place for camaraderie. It is not. It’s escapism, a form a narcissism that allows millions to feel a bit better about their lives without doing anything to change their lives and the lives of untold others for the better.

Maybe my jadedness comes from nearly two decades in the DC area, where I regularly root for the local teams to fail, because I love it when the fans here are disillusioned. Maybe it’s because of the poor quality of most of the sports I watch (or in the case of the NFL, have stopped watching for going on three years now). Or, maybe it’s because my Knicks haven’t a title since Nixon was president! Whatever it is, I will continue to root for athletes, but not for teams. Especially those who take a stand, those who have a purpose beyond their athleticism, those whose bodies make me a bit envious, but only envious enough to keep working out, to keep running, to keep draining Js. Also, the NFL is still blackballing Colin Kaepernick!

 

 

God, Graviano and Darwin

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Atheism, Biology, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Evangelical Christianity, Evolution, God, Higher Power, Identity, John Graviano, Politics of Religion, Salvation, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, The Universe


Galaxies in clusters/ superclusters of  dark matter filaments,  as part of Pan-STARRS sky survey, July 17, 2010. (Boylan-Kolchin/The Virgo Consortium/Durham University/PA Wire)

Tens of thousands of galaxies in clusters/superclusters of dark matter filaments, as part of Pan-STARRS sky survey, July 17, 2010. (Boylan-Kolchin/The Virgo Consortium/Durham University/PA Wire)

From Boy @ The Window, circa October ’83:

Bio with Mr. Graviano did provide some answers for me beyond the science. The man was also an assistant coach for MVHS’ basketball team. Although I know he loved basketball, Graviano was a heck of a science teacher. He didn’t do anything particularly exciting. He just made it seem as if we were learning how to tie our shoes when he was teaching us binomial nomenclature or the difference between mitosis and meiosis. Graviano began the year with Charles Darwin’s trip aboard the HMS Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s, observing finches and developing his theory of natural selection. We were learning about Darwin and evolution, something I knew flew in the face of my family’s Hebrew-Israelite beliefs. Despite that, what I learned in Biology every day made more sense to me than attempting to interpret the first chapter of Genesis or Balkis Makeda’s dreams warning us against the imperfect science of intellectual types like Darwin. What surprised me more was the fact that no one in our class questioned Graviano or the fact that he was teaching evolution, at least not in the open.

Biology gave me food for thought. I understood the science, the process of natural selection and mutation, the reality that over numerous eons life gradually evolved on earth to include intelligent mammals, primates, and humans. At the same time, we were being taught in temple that God had created or reclaimed (depending on interpretation) the earth in six days or six thousand years. The reclamation interpretation left room for everything that science said had occurred prior to the ascent of modern humans. The creation story obviously didn’t. I was confused, having to reconcile the scientific method with religious beliefs. I solved the problem in my own mind by choosing to stand on the reclamation interpretation of Genesis’ first chapter. But that didn’t completely satisfy me.

It was part of a long but interesting period that led me to become a plain old, nondenominational Christian by April ’84. But at this point in the Boy @ The Window story, I was literally caught between the stupidity of being a Hebrew-Israelite and the idea that there wasn’t a higher power at all.

Yet, despite Graviano’s class, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that evolution was a random process. To me, that seemed to approach the ridiculous. Biological evolution’s hardly been perfect. But one completely random set of changes built upon another set of completely random changes over three or four billion years likely doesn’t yield life on this planet in its current state. Too many patterns for me reflected in biology, mathematics and — as I’d learn in a couple of years — physics to accept evolution as a completely random process.

Portrait of Charles Darwin, by George Richmond (circa 1838), October 15, 2012. (Jdcollins13 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Portrait of Charles Darwin, by George Richmond (circa 1838), October 15, 2012. (Jdcollins13 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That was really my only sticking point. For my ninth and tenth-grade classmates, though, I couldn’t believe their stone-faced silences over the Darwin story. I knew that some of them held beliefs that ran completely counter to the idea of evolution. Some, even, were likely what we now call evangelical, literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible Christians. Yet they were as silent as comatose patients for most of the first marking period. What I learned a little later on in life was that silence was as much a form of protest or disapproval as outright vocal opposition.

As for me, I found the processes of mutation, mitosis and meiosis fascinating. I felt as if I was learning a small but important secret about God and the universe. That both — if one believes in God and has some understanding of the universe — have intellectual and scientific minds. Graviano, through his mechanical teaching style, was at least able to convey that to us, if any of us paid close enough attention.

If Graviano opened my eyes to modern science and the understanding of life on its most basic level, Yom Kippur ’83 opened me up to understanding why I no longer put my trust in Maurice’s God.

I guess if I hadn’t already been in the midst of a spiritual identity crisis, I wouldn’t have used my classes in ninth grade as my way of figuring out how to rebuild my identity, and in the process, figure out what and in whom I wanted to believe. Too bad folks who now run things in this country never took one moment’s time to do the same.

All Work and No Play

28 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Acid, Acting, Atheism, Balance, CIS, Computer and Information System, Evolution, Falcon Crest, Fringe, History Major, Intolerance, John Noble, LSD, Neal Galpern, Pitt, Religion, Robert Foxworth, Sexual Harassment, University of Pittsburgh, Walter Bishop, Yin and Yang


Yin & Yang symbol from Taoism, good symbol for balance in life, January 28, 2013. (http://taoism.about.com).

Yin & Yang symbol from Taoism, good symbol for balance in life, January 28, 2013. (http://taoism.about.com).

As those high schools students I taught through JSA at Princeton in the summers of ’08 and ’09 either have come to realize or are realizing now, finding balance between school, full-time or part-time work, family and some semblance of a social life is just a tad difficult. Sometimes, it’s even impossible. So it was for me the spring of ’89, the last spring before I’d put together what I came to call my “16-week strategy for success and a social life.”

It was the semester where in which I worked 36 hours a week over a seven-week period and faced sexual harassment from a co-worker who was the BFF of my supervisor of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning labs for Computer and Information Services (CIS) (see my post “On People and Stress” from February ’09). It was the last semester in which I had to worry about my mother and my younger siblings from afar because of the possibility of domestic violence, as my idiot stepfather Maurice still lived with them at 616.

This was my first set of classes as a History major, but I also had some general ed requirements to fulfill (see my post “Major Change” from October ’10). It would’ve been a tough semester even if I hadn’t worked, but with the CIS schedule the way it was, I was in for an interesting ride. For Macro, the chair of the Economics department was our professor. The class was at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a discussion section at 8 am on Tuesday to boot. It was almost as if he wanted folks to fail. With my schedule the way it was, I rarely made it to class on Tuesdays, and I only made it to one discussion section all semester long. To make up for that, I never missed the class on Thursdays, and often participated in the lecture discussions, such as they were.

Actor Robert Foxworth on Broadway in August: Osage County, August 2008. (Joan Marcus/Playbill).

Actor Robert Foxworth on Broadway in August: Osage County, August 2008. (Joan Marcus/Playbill).

Shakespeare was later in the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taught by Wion, who looked like the actor Robert Foxworth from the CBS show Falcon Crest, only not quite as handsome. He delivered lines from Taming of The Shrew and Othello like he’d been a wannabe actor in a previous career but realized teaching was more of his shtick. Wion often used Freudian pop psychology to explain the motives of characters in Shakespeare’s plays, and as he did, all of our eyes glazed over. This analysis for us was so ’70s, especially for the second-wave feminists in the class.

My Bio and Philosophy classes seemed to fit under the theme of “questioning God,” as there were students in both who had an ax to grind against “dumb Christians.” Bio in some ways was easier, at least because we had a professor who understood why some of us who were Christian might find evolution difficult to swallow. After several yelps from students during one of his lectures on evolution, mutation and reproduction, he said, “just because there’s evolution doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist. Who’s to say that evolution isn’t a higher being’s method for the creation of life?” I appreciated that answer very much.

In existentialism class, especially the discussion section, no reconciliation was possible. My discussion section instructor was an Australian man in his late-twenties, with curly hair like the lead singer from Simply Red, except my instructor’s hair was a dirty blonde. He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and said as much. I was ignored.

No class that semester drove me nuts like my History majors writing seminar with Neal Galpern. We met on Monday and Wednesday afternoons for about an hour and a half, and it was the most boring hour and a half on my schedule. Galpern was an aging hippie complete with comb-over who graduated with doctorate in hand from Berkeley in ’75. He sometimes acted like he was still dropping acid. His stuttering starts and stops and numerous “Um”s could stop his lectures and our discussions cold. He wanted each of us to write a research-based paper of no less than twenty papers on any comparative topic in history that we could come up with, as vague as the man himself.

John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop on Fringe, Season 5, after dropping acid, December 2012. (http://fringetelevision.com).

John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop on Fringe, Season 5, after dropping acid, December 2012. (http://fringetelevision.com).

I couldn’t stand Galpern and his constant skipping over my hand in class and his snarky comments to all of us as if we were all dense and he was clearer than Antarctic ice melt. I didn’t challenge Galpern in class, at least not directly. I challenged him with my project. I decided to do a paper that compared the main features of the Civil Rights Movement in the US to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa. Admittedly it was too big a project, but it was Galpern’s job to help me narrow the topic into a doable chunk.

Instead all the advice he gave me consisted of “You need to find another topic, um . . . because, um . . . I’m afraid . . . I don’t, um . . . know much . . . about this.” I refused to budge. I wasn’t about to do a stupid paper on medieval Europe just because that happened to be his area of alleged expertise. After a meeting where Galpern finally gave in to me, I went across the hall to our classroom on the third floor of Forbes Quad and imitated my professor’s halting style of conversation. Galpern walked in, and I just kept going until I finished my, um, sentence. Yeah, it would be safe to say that he didn’t like me too much either!

I finished that semester with two A-‘s in my writing seminar and in existential philosophy, a B+ in Shakespeare, a B in Biology, and even pulled out a C+ in Macro, despite my lack of attendance. It was a difficult time. Yet it was also the start of my growth into early adulthood, and understanding that finding balance would be the key to sustained success.

Randomness & Faith

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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Agnostic, Atheism, Atheist, Belief, Bible, Buddhism, Evolution, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Grace, Love, Mathematics, Mystery, Physics, Randomness, Reason, Religion, Science, Scientific Method, The Universe, Youth


Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Randomness equation, Schrage random number generator, December 27, 2012. (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov).

Today’s my forty-third birthday (at least, as of 8:37 am EST). It means that I’ve been a spiritual believer of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. With so much that has happened in my life, there are many who wonder why I believe in God, or why I’m a Christian in particular. With my expertise as a historian, my background in math and science (and continuing study of such), there have been many who’ve mocked and questioned my faith in anything other than the randomness of the universe. With the world in seemingly endless turmoil, good people maimed and killed, and evil people able to get away with maiming and killing others, there are those who greet any profession of belief in a higher power with anger and bitterness.

To me, that’s too bad. I can see all sides of this argument. I’ve been a Christian for more than twenty-eight years, and before that, an unwilling, if outwardly obvious, Hebrew-Israelite. In that time, I’ve also been an atheist, agnostic and angry, a bit of a Buddhist and a Muslim to boot. I’ve gone years without prayed and prayed at least once every day for nearly twenty years. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least six times in three decades, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. I’ve gone to temple, to Roman Catholic mass, to church, sometimes every week for years, sometimes not at all for years. I’ve had crises of faith and been almost unquestioning in faith over the years.

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

An actual double-slit experiment (electrons or photons behaving as particles and waves, in two places at same time), December 27, 2012. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour)

I’m also a believer in science and the scientific method. I realize that even with all of the advances in biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics, that there is much more we don’t know versus all that we’ve learned in the past two centuries. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that the universe — that life itself — is some random event or a long-chain series of random events. I’m with evolution on everything except the random. I don’t think that the universe can be seen as random. Even as chaotic as our lives may seem, the choices that we make do provide order. It’s never been sheer dumb luck that has determined everything that has occurred in my life, as other people have made their own choices that can easily affect the range of choices in my own life.

Most of all, while I do believe that there are reasons behind the events that occur in our lives and in world, that these reason are neither random nor something that God somehow came down from on high to make possible. Whether it’s Hurricane Sandy or Sandy Hook Elementary School, the civil war in Syria or a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, somehow so many have it that either God’s angry with us or that God allows horrible things to happen to us. Or that there is no God, because a real God would prevent these seemingly random events from occurring at all.

All this proves one thing, and one thing only. That most of us have little understanding of faith, of God, or of the universe itself. Period. Even those of us who are experts in particle physics or theoretical mathematics don’t know enough to dismiss God or to prove their educated guess (otherwise known as belief) in the randomness of the universe. Most of us who do believe in God — at least, those of us who are Christian — treat God as if he were Zeus casting down lightning bolts to keep us in line.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble and bronze (restored), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Roman Seated Zeus, marble/ bronze, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 4, 2006. (Sanne Smit via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I see God in the universe, in the creation and re-creation of life, and yes, even in the various tragic and apparently chaotic events that have occurred in my life and in this world. That I don’t think these events to be random doesn’t make me any less of a thinker. I just don’t accept the blind faith of scientists in the idea that maybe cosmic rays led to the mutations in the primordial soup of our ancient oceans that led to the spark of life and evolution. I also don’t believe that God is simply presiding over every event on our planet and in the universe, making life-and-death decisions that bring pain and anguish to our lives for enjoyment or as a form of punishment.

Rather, God for me has been about living life by principles like social justice, social and spiritual mobility, love, forgiveness, grace and wisdom. Explaining what may or may not be random, each and every conceivable mystery of the universe or of life? I know that this isn’t in the Bible. But I do know that the reasons behind why bad, ugly, even evil things have happened in my life don’t include the “random nature of the universe.” People made decisions, I’ve made decisions, institutions made decisions, that have had an impact on the course, speed and direction of my life over the last forty-three years.

So, even when I’ve found myself angry with God, I’ve also been cognizant of the role all and each of us play in the heaven and hell that tends to be our lives, separate and together, in this world of ours.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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