Beep Baseball ?

Beep Baseball ?

A while back, some staff members of a park district where I worked were asked to join in a Saturday sampling of "beep baseball" at one of our parks. "Come on," we were invited, "you'll have a good time and you can learn to play it with your eyes closed." We missed the humor of that remark since most of us had never heard of the game before. So we showed up that morning as the visiting team, intrigued by a new sport and not knowing quite what to expect. As the name implies, the game uses an oversized baseball that makes a continuous loud beeping noise. The bats are regulation, but there are only three bases; home, first, and third, and they consist of tall inflatable Joe Palooka type knockdown toys that each make their own special noise. A runner advances to home by whacking a palooka and continuing on to the next base. With the ball and the bases turned on, the shortened playing field became filled with insolent electronic crickets, each insisting to be heard. All this extra locating equipment is necessary because this is a game for the blind. Here, only three people are allowed to see; the pitcher, the plate umpire and a field umpire who calls the rough location of the ball—all the rest are sightless. The home team that invited us was blind, either permanently sightless, or functionally blind and using a blindfold to completely block out the remainder of their vision. As the visiting team, all of us could see and we were given blindfolds and patient introductory counseling by the home team about the rules of the game. They batted first, so we wandered out into the grass. Awkward in our new world of total darkness, we stood rotated in various directions away from the batter at the plate. All we had to do, we were told, was to just find the batted ball and pick it up to put the runner out. Well, it was hardly a contest. The home team whacked the ball with monotonous regularity and ran full tilt for the noisy first base while we fumbled around in the turf listening for a rude and mocking ball that seemed always to be somewhere else. After the longest time, their side was finally, and for us mercifully, retired by outs—mostly by strikes. Only one out was made by hitting a visiting fielder in the foot, a stroke of luck that made her job of finding the ball quite a bit easier. Our visiting team players rarely hit the ball at all, and when we did, we stumbled with our arms stuck out like curb feelers with all the confidence of Columbus approaching the edge of the world. Any of our actual contact with a base, which mostly occurred after a blind fielder had already found the ball, was never as spectacular as the home team's hitters who knocked the squawking base and

themselves a dozen feet in two different directions. The home team was exceptionally gracious and patient with us; they rarely hooted, and after the score had run up a comfortable margin, finally offered a little tip that when the sighted crowd loudly cheered for their runner, the racket made it impossible to find the base. We shrewdly kept our cheering to a minimum after that, but it didn't really seem to improve our runner's detection skills. The game was also held up for noise a few times while the sirens of ambulances and police cars passed in the distance.

All in all, it was a remarkable morning. We, the sighted ones, could never have known the difference in senses and perspective if we hadn't been forced into it. Each of us watched in awe as the blind swung and ran in an unknown field with the most incredible gusto and fearlessness. I wondered in a moment's reflection how we would act if suddenly denied vision. Would we feel sorry for ourselves and hide somewhere, sullen and embittered? Could we ever be so accepting and brave to go outside to laugh and find gentle humor in the awkwardness of the temporary sightlessness of the visiting team? It was a comment, or rather a full lesson, on the strength and resilience of people who could not understand themselves to be handicapped, who had the audacity to play at our games and soundly thrash us. After the competition was over and we left, they still laughed, and ran, and fill out their scorecard for the team in Braille; no special favors asked. We walked away, alone with our thoughts, and abruptly realized what were the most important awareness and understandings of that exceptional morning. At any point in time, whenever we wanted, we had only to lift the blindfolds from our faces and we were out of the darkness, back in the world where we could see again. We could stop playing the game anytime, and they couldn't.

••• Growing numbers of union members and families have been personally touched by the downsizings and shakeups in our economy and the simultaneous changes in the strength and influence of unions in the United States. Our independence, the respect, and the high wages won by years of struggles and efforts stretching back well before the Depression are eroding before our eyes. Jobs are lost; industries restructured; and NAFTA has already begun its ruinous work sending work elsewhere. Dwindling memberships demand that something be done; the leaderships find that old methods and expectations don't work any more.

As we argue about the mimes and cures, and look for someone or something to blame, we skip past the requirement to look at ourselves. We choose not to understand our own role in our expanding misfortune and become more indignant and demanding that something comes to our rescue. We have put on blindfolds and we now stand rotated in different directions in an increasingly uncomfortable and unfamiliar world. What we once had, was won for us by the battles of unions, crafts, and guilds that go back a half-dozen generations. As justice was brought to the relations between business and labor, we inherited golden years with expanding discretionary income that lifted the wages of others and swelled our economy to fit the opportunities. What was good for the unions actually turned out to be good for the country. But, we have slowly lost the ties to those men and women who fought and walked strike lines for months and even years to win the basic demands of a decent living. Their decent living became a good living; and that good living became our easy living. Complacency and indifference quietly replaced the energy and vitality of the labor movement. We selectively saw only what we wanted, our vigilance weakened, and the old exploitive forces closed back in. Slogans will not drive them away. Platitudes and sound bites will be hollow weapons. If the union leadership and membership think there are easy and familiar answers, then historians will record these next years as the decisive demise of organized labor in this country. It can't be said any other way. For the first time, our children will inherit less than our parents had given us. When we lament about that future and look only to others to save us, then perhaps we deserve what we get. If we are merely resigned, and see no better future, then we have learned no lessons from our past brothers and sisters who helped shape this nation. We will have allowed unions to become legends, stories and homilies that excuse and conveniently deny our own participation in the decline. Left to themselves, things will not get better. Now that businesses have discovered that there will be no lightning bolts from the sky, they schedule large layoffs and plant relocations in pursuit of only tiny adjustments of the bottom line. Singularly shortsighted and selfish, they do not know—or apparently care— about what will happen to the larger fabric of our society. Like herd animals in a stampede, they now cut managers and white-collar workers with the same pious animation as they once did the blue-collar rank and file. Management and labor soon will occupy a new level playing field—as discards and castoffs meeting at the unemployment office. It will take some time for businesses to finally realize that a nation of eternally

replaceable, minimum wage hamburger flippers cannot buy goods produced out of this country at the prices projected by self-serving MBA forecasts. As that recognition grows and corrective forces evolve, the United States will endure unprecedented pain in the economic restructuring ahead because no one looked at the bigger picture. Well, union members had better take off the blindfolds and look around. We are one of the strongest corrective forms available and that has always been our calling. Union members risked their lives standing up to the "bosses"—and they won. Think of those palooka bases as the same "bosses"—just businesses puffed up for show. If we tackled them as the home team did, or our union founders did, we'd see how quickly the game would change. If we have forgotten, or been seduced by a comfortable legacy and would rather make excuses than fight, then we must relearn our role. It doesn't matter where the lessons come from. There are examples of the needed pride, bravery and fierce determination everywhere. In that warm summer's morning, without realizing they were teachers, the home team showed us, "Change every thing you can." Those remarkable players could not afford complacency and indifference. Neither can we. We somehow thought that unions could coast along, or the world would be tolerant of that indulgence, but we were wrong. Someone had to fight to get what we now have; obviously, we will have to fight again to keep it and to pass it on to our children—the next generation of our brothers and sisters.

Bob Wulkowicz Local 134, IBEW © 1994