I have been home for four days now. My "virus", which is another name for a cold, I guess, is now moving out, and I am feeling much better. I can go for hours without wishing for a pillow. Being home, I have missed hearing others talk with excitment about the Red Sox, but have had a lot of time to think about how happy those players must be to have the playoffs over.
Being home, I also haven't had to hear the negatives and the criticism about this and that. Red Sox fans are so used to bad news I don't think they know how to act. The Yankees are stunned, and although I am not a Yankee hater, like a lot of Boston fans, it is nice to see our team come from behind and win. George bought me a National League Champions Red Sox shirt at a sports store who had a grand opening yesterday--how is that for good marketing strategy?-- and we bought two more Red Sox shirts last night to wear on weekends. Why not join the fun? Having a world series to look forward to is good for folks around here, and good for businesses as well, who are selling shirts and party goods and extra groceries for all the festivities.
We also have a downside to all this celebration. I am horrified at the belligerant crowds that we see around Fenway when the Yankees play and whenever we have something to celebrate.
College kids make up about half of Boston's population during the school months, and of course, living in small rooms in dorms and crowded houses, they are anxious to get out in public to celebrate and drink beer and act crazy. College kids cram the bars around Fenway. It is a dangerous combination, drinking and being young. The "party" activity around Fenway often gets out of hand. At the Super Bowl celebration, they tipped over cars, and a young man got killed. Police label them thugs, they have video cam pictures of these kids doing it, and they say they find them and expell them from school.
This week, the police were there in force, because they had been criticized for NOT being there after the Super Bowl, and they had cannisters of pepper spray which they shot into the crowd. One "projectile" from this spray hit a girl in her eye, and she later died. Shooting anything into a crowd seems very irresponsible. They also showed police using force to push kids down the street. The kids, of course, were not cooperating. The truth about this is that if you push someone, they usually push back. A young woman died. It is a shame. There is a cloud hanging over the celebration. The police department has accepted the blame, but say the rowdy crowd is really at fault. It is not a good place to be, out there where they are climbing up the outside walls of the empty ballpark, or tipping over and setting fire to cars. One kid climbed up the backside of the green monster - the high green wall at Fenway-- fell off and was bleeding from the head. These alcohol-fueled pranks are life threatening, but kids don't get it. No one could get to him to make him stop. This young woman was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But no one should be in that area when cars and burning and the police are in riot gear. This is not war, it is a victory celebration of a baseball game, for goodness sake.
Thousands of university students live in close proximity to Boston, and thousands are cramped into tiny spaces, with incredible pressure put on them to succeed. Add to that the fact that binge drinking is close to the norm at colleges these days and Boston has a problem. More drunk kids than usual. They are from everywhere in the world, but they are ours for as long as they are in our colleges. We are the ultimate college town.
I am very concerned about young people on college campuses. It is their first time away from home, and they have a lot to learn, and not just from books. I was appalled when I visited my son's dorm for the first time and saw the 12 steps of Alchoholics Annonymous on the dorm elevator wall. It is not something that I thought would be so public. College is a time to have fun, to make friends, to learn...not to gaze at a 12 Step Program mantra every day without a choice.
AA is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it is usually anonymous and quiet and a place of refuge and hope for folks who are admitting they have a problem with alcohol. To post those 12 Steps on the wall where people have to read them whether they want to or not seems to trivialize them.
So, Boston won, and a young girl is dead, and the fans are rowdy as usual, and the bars still serve beer like it is water, and we probably haven't learned anything. The police are having meetings and press conferences, and we have the World Series coming up and the bars are still there. After that, we have the Patriots, and...maybe another Super Bowl. And we still have 100,000 college students in our town who can't wait for the next celebration.
May God watch over us. Oh yes,... Go Sox!
