On caring for one another - A Hunt and Peck

Just a reminder...

By lil_scooter93 Apr 6, 2018, 1:09pm EDT

Our community is a weird, happy little place much of the time. It’s so nice to rest a bit after fighting for so long. We’ve had great, demanding, exacting debates. We’ve made room in the neighborhood; we’ve exchanged waves at the corner store. But we still commit our sins; someone rushes in from across the bar. We forget each other’s stakes, don’t respect them. We’ve assumed those stakes are the same all the time, for everyone; we’ve failed to practice care, to embrace our uncertainty.

You might have noticed I stole the title of this post and the above quote from an article that Meg Rowley wrote for Fangraphs a few weeks ago. It is a wonderful post and Meg is a wonderful writer - one of my favorites. I implore you all to give it a read.

The world can be a tough place. For some, it is tougher than it is for others, but no one is spared from facing hardships and challenges. I have been very fortunate to face very little adversity in my life. I can, in part, credit that to being born into a certain amount of privilege. For that, I am hugely grateful and too me, part of that means I have a responsibility to stand up for others without that luxury. To know one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. Emerson wrote that and since the day I read it many years ago it has stayed with me.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. It brings people together. It educates. In our pockets, we have access to more information and more knowledge than generations before us ever thought possible. But everything has a cost, and with that access comes other things. Just as easily as one can share a cat video or an inspirational quote, someone else can leak someone’s private photos or share hate speech. The Internet is a wonderful, terrifying thing. It is so powerful. Sometimes that power can be abused.

I am not here to tell you to be nice to everyone for the sake of being nice. There are times to take a stand for things that are important. There are times when criticism is necessary. Perhaps this piece is one of those times. If it is, I will wear it. The point I want to make is that the world is hard enough on its own. Living is hard work. Why make it harder for no reason?

One thing I love about Viva El Birdos is that every day I visit the site, someone or something makes my day a little better. The friends I have made over the years make my day a little better. In the darkest times of my life, it has been here - a stable, constant thing I could look forward to when everything else was in chaos. Spreading that joy to others is my dream for this site. I would like to think that when lboros began Viva El Birdos, that is what he intended. None of that is possible without you all, though.

With the baseball season now upon us, it might become easier to forget our humanity, to become a faceless online vessel of harshness and negativity. In the heat of the moment we might forget that behind the screen, the computer or, in the case of the players, the television, lies other humans, trying to do their best just like we are. Viva El Birdos is a place for thoughtful discourse on baseball (and at times wildly unrelated topics), but at its core, it is a community - A St. Louis Cardinals community. We will disagree and we will debate, as communities often do, but at the end of the day, we will care for one another. And that - along with our love of the St. Louis Cardinals - is what makes this blog what it is.

Thank you for that.