The MACA girls hoops season ended amidst the quite prolonged winter of 2019. We're all toughing it out as best we can with game faces. We seek to project a cheerful air and carry ourselves as if nothing is amiss. Most certainly something is amiss: the weather. Hope I'm not coming across as just a crotchety older person.
I'm old enough to remember having fun at Morris hoops events with Tom Carrington when he was a father and not a grandfather. Tom's interest remains intense as ever, maybe even more intense. He has not one but two granddaughters on the MACA girls team. We cheer for Maddie and Meredith.
The proud dad is Matthew Carrington whose work as accountant keeps me out of trouble with the taxing agencies.
Many of us are finding out that our fee for tax preparation services, like from the very capable Matthew, are having to go up. They are having to go up, ironically, due to the GOP-fueled "tax cut bill." I guess more complexity is being incorporated, going in the face of public sentiment that would prefer less complexity. Alas, it seems rather an "Alice Through the Looking Glass" world. The news tells us that tax refunds are not as generous as we expect. We learn that this is actually going to affect the economy.
The GOP's "tax cut" measure, as you might have suspected, has benefits mainly for the super rich folk. "He who has the gold makes the rules." The Republican Party plays us all for rubes but that's nothing new. It seems we might be waking up to smell the coffee but it's slow.
We have a president of the U.S. seeking to expand power around his executive branch. Our system should allow for the proper checks and balances but it seems teetering, possibly, on the brink of collapse. The emergency declaration provision was enacted with the idea that we would surely have a president with the wisdom to exercise it properly. The current state of affairs has gotten so out of whack, people we once viewed as wise conservatives like John McCain and George W. Bush are being rejected, mocked etc. by the "conservative" mob of today, e.g. Michelle Malkin.
I rub shoulders with people around Morris who simply cannot be aroused to feel concern. They certainly would not be aroused to the point where they might consider Democratic Party positions. This scares me more and more. It's as if Democrats have cooties in the eyes of those people. Check afternoon radio from anywhere in the U.S. and you're still likely to hear the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ben Shapiro and worse yet Sean Hannity, the latter having become a cartoon character caricature of himself. For him it has nothing to do with ideology anymore - that train has left the station, and now it's all about identity politics.
More significantly, the sycophants for Trump know where power resides and they want to be close to it. It surely is intoxicating. And I would assert here that it is profoundly dangerous. Up until now, our justice system has been barely holding on. I suggest that it is on a precipice and if it falls though the ice, as it were, we could be on a course toward 1930s Germany.
MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski has been suspecting the worst could happen for a long time now. Mika's morning TV partner, her husband Joe Scarborough, has tried to be optimistic. Joe in effect says "this too shall pass." I'm scared because women tend to have better intuition than men.
Are you catching highlights of the CPAC conference? Where is all this taking us?
What if Trump's people succeed in setting up a law enforcement apparatus to "keep an eye on the deep state?" Maybe secret police will come to get me in the middle of the night. For now that's an exaggeration, for now. It's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" but without the Cheshire Cat grin.
I wonder what Tom Carrington's late wife Laura would say. She and I had extensive conversations on politics. Perhaps the most notable feature photo I took while at the Sun Tribune was of Laura at a victory party for a Republican state lawmaker. She had previously been an active Democrat.
End of season for GBB Tigers
Tom and Laura's grandchildren are on the MACA girls basketball team, coached by Dale Henrich. The team certainly seemed, to me at least, to have a true spark of talent and potential. They won their first game of post-season but then lost the second. Frankly that's tepid. That's pedestrian. The season will get lost in the annals of MACA hoops - nothing real notable. I felt the talent was there to at least get to the third round.
Some people in this town have always questioned my analysis. As much as some people disliked the work I did for the Sun Tribune, I always showed tremendous enthusiasm.
Granted, MACA was up against the top seed Thursday. The Eagles of Eden Valley-Watkins had that distinction. But I'm not sure those seeding positions carried a lot of weight. I told Tom that if all else fails just set up Maddie to shoot 3's, not that the team didn't have other fine talent. EV-W defeated our Tigers by ten, 63-53, at Willmar High School. So now the Eagles will face Litchfield, the No. 3 seed, for all the sub-section marbles at Southwest State University, Marshall, 8 p.m. Tuesday. No trip south for the MACA GBB fans this year, sorry.
I feel the Tigers should have gone further than they did. Someone told me we led at halftime against EV-W. Details in the Friday Willmar paper were very spotty and limited.
The Tigers finished the season with a 15-9 record that shows there were lots of high points. It just seems we have trouble parlaying that success into the post-season, and I find that to be rather discouraging. Please don't criticize me, as I'm just trying to profess faith in the talent of our student athletes. The one thing you cannot do in this town is criticize the coaches.
The Friday Willmar paper told us that "statistics were not provided at press time." Way to go, Forum Communications.
Weather wears on us
Early March is a time when I once got set for the St. Patrick's Day five-mile footrace in St. Paul. What a spectacle that was. It was considered the kickoff of the running season for practitioners in the Twin Cities area. A few outstate practitioners like yours truly would join the fold also. We'd feel giddy gathering on the campus of University of St. Thomas, ready to feel the camaraderie after a long cold winter.
But the winters were not as long and cold as this one. We could feel at least traces of spring in early and mid-March. The St. Patrick's Day race was point-to-point in the 1980s, in other words starting in one place and ending in another. So we'd start at University of St. Thomas, go down historic Summit Avenue to the State Capitol, and then arrive at the finish point where tables of fruit and refreshments awaited us. We loved the last stretch being downhill. We boarded orange school buses to get back to the campus.
I stopped attending many years ago and it's my understanding that today, it's an out-and-back course of five kilometers rather than five miles.
I remember some runners dressing in costume, reflecting the tradition of the "Bay to Breakers" running event in San Francisco. Leave it to those crazy San Francisco folks, but don't underestimate us Minnesotans as we get squirrelly after a long winter. I saw several runners wearing costumes making them a six-pack of Schmidt Beer. A couple dudes carried flags as we accelerated from the start, making me feel like we were something like a charging army. An Irish army? I am neither Irish nor Catholic. Although, Dublin was founded by the Vikings and I am 100 percent Scandinavian.
It would be hard getting ready to run a five-mile race at present. I could slip and fall on my posterior.
Many people around Morris thought I was rather crazy during those years when I ran up to 70 miles a week all year long. I was underweight. Crazy or not, my health probably benefited from my weight being low, thus saving strain on my heart, as opposed to if I carried a Kent Hrbek-like physique.
Seriously, sometimes I would run late at night on the outskirts of Morris like along the bypass. It's a whole different story today: I'd probably be accosted by the cops. I hear you can be accosted by cops even if you're just walking through town in the middle of the night, nothing awry about your behavior. Times change and I'm trying to cling to reality, to the new set of norms that emerge. Sometimes it isn't easy. I'm shocked so many of my long-time acquaintances around Morris are passing on.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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| Statue of St. Urho in Menahga, Minnesota |
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