By Mitch Lee
It was mid-April 1975 and I was still celebrating Frank Robinson becoming the first African-American to manage a Major League baseball team.
Robinson, who was both manager and a player for the Cleveland Indians, placed himself into the lineup as a designated hitter and hit a home run in his first at-bat to help the Indians beat the Yankees…the team I hated most in baseball.
But not all was good news around the world. The evening news reports of the Khmer Rouge taking over Cambodia became even more ugly with images of genocide.
The news the entire week was filled with too many disturbing images for a nine year old boy to process.
Lebanon was in the start of a civil war, and South Vietnam was collapsing.
Orders were finally given for Operation Frequent Wind to evacuate all Americans from South Vietnam.
It has been forty years since my youthful eyes laid witness to this chaotic month of world events.
How could these events change or effect the growth of a boy growing up in the quiet and solitude of my mountains?
I suppose we are all a product of who we associate with and what life events we have lived.
But these events were as far off as an Isaac Asimov sci-fi book.
But I sat on the living room floor of my Limekiln Lake home witnessing the world’s events on 18 inches of black and white fuzzy television while the last snow of winter melted outside.
And it did indeed change me. It opened my eyes to a world filled with people who had beliefs and convictions that placed the very life of a human as sacrificial to what they felt was right.
I was of a mind that everyone should be able to get along if they could find some common ground.
I had a fellow I went to school with who was a great bully.
Whenever I felt him become menacing to me I brought up fishing—which we both liked to do—and somehow it eased the situation.
But in the real world there was no real common ground for far too many folks.
Though I have grown, we as a world have not.
Not a day passes where I do not see an on-line or television report of a world where the convictions of some will put the lives of others in peril.
I hear in my own circles the anger stirring to just retaliate with greater strength and posture to rid the world of these afflicted convictions.
And as a 50 year old, I am still in no way ready to sort out the right way to move forward to a world where putting others to death is the only solution.
Feeling safe from the threat of violence over my own convictions has made me calm and rational in my thoughts about the lives of others.
Growing up Adirondack has provided some protection from all the anger that fills this planet… and I guess I like it that way.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,
lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com