Archive For The “Politics” Category

Still Sad And Upset, I Try to Relearn How To Write In A Vastly Altered New World

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Still Sad And Upset, I Try to Relearn How To Write In A Vastly Altered New World

I used to know how to write.

Sure, I have written a lot about Lehigh football, the Patriot League, the NFL, and whatever else I damn well please over the course of the last fourteen or more years.  Maybe I didn’t write particularly great all the time — but sometimes, maybe more by accident than by design, the writing turned out OK.

But the one constant was that I wrote.  I’d sit in front of the warm glow of the laptop monitor and write.  I’d start in the bedroom, before my tired wife would kick me out and I’d write on the laptop in the office so that the clicking of the keys didn’t irritate her.

What I did know how to do was to put my face in front of the laptop and write about the sports subjects that interested me.

But these last few months, I’ve found it harder to come up with the energy to come up with posts every week.  Since it’s the offseason, I’ve got some time to try to analyze it and think it through, and I think I’ve come up with a few reasons why.

If there is one simple answer to the question, it is: today’s world.
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Story Of Philadephia Eagles’ 1968 Mud Bowl Parallels 2016 Election

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Story Of Philadephia Eagles’ 1968 Mud Bowl Parallels 2016 Election
How do you write about sports when it doesn’t feel like a game anymore?

This is the crux of the question I’ve been struggling with over the last few weeks.

Like many of you, I was shocked at the election of Donald Trump to become our next President.  Also like many of you, I paid as he did things differently when it came to talking about the political foes he defeated, how he went about assembling a cabinet, and how he engaged the press.

Everything about this point in time in history feels historic.  No set of Americans have ever elected someone like Donald Trump as President.  Nobody, not Trump of the mobs of Twitter people that seem to follow him, have used Twitter to attack people so directly almost like a weapon, especially focused at journalists that are trying to get at the truth.

Frankly, nobody knows what’s coming next.

So how do you write about sports at a time like this?  How do you compartmentalize what you’re feeling about the election, and crack open the vault which waxes philosophic about Lehigh’s latest and greatest postseason award for football, or latest achievement in basketball or wrestling?

The answer appears to be to look to history – and to look to sports – to find narratives.  And I found one.

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