BUDDY AT THE BEACH

BUDDY ON POINT AT THE BEACH...

WHAT'S UP? A FAMILY OF MALLARDS...

...BUT I DON'T HAVE WEBBED FEET!...

...I'LL JUST GO AND FIND A DEER LEG BONE INSTEAD!

Sunday, 8:00 AM.  61 degrees F at the ferry dock, 56 on the back porch.  Wind variable, mostly calm with occasional light gusts.  The sky is clear with some scattered white clouds, after yesterday's .6" of rainfall, the humidity 82%.  The barometer is rising somewhat, now at 29.84".  The forecast is for cooler and partly cloudy weather in the week ahead, with a chance of a thunderstorm midweek.

   Yesterday being a rainy day, I took Buddy for a run on the beach before dinner.  He went on a solid point at the mouth of the Sioux River, the object of his rigidity being a family of mallard ducks.  He went in the water but he doesn't have webbed feet and the current is strong.  So like any intelligent being, he went inead  and did what he can do well; he found a deer leg bone.

OFF THE CUFF

   We watch a lot of baseball, and have noticed the gradual reduction of  African American players (and a corresponding increase in Hispanic players). Now,  baseball is far from a mirror image of America, but if one is a fan it offers vignettes of our population, culture and history.  Currently, about 8% of MLB players are black, down from 16% a few years back.

   Many reasons have been given for that decline...i.e., the popularity of basketball in the inner cities, the decline of baseball as a sport in general, etc.  But upon further consideration of the statistics, I believe that it mirrors the decline of the African American population in America.  The black population is now 13.2% of the American total.  6.6% would be the natural percentage of the male black population, so 8% is actually a pretty healthy representation  of that population playing in Major League Baseball.  I remember not long ago when the prediction was that it would be only a generation or two and the country would be more than 50% African American.  What happened to that statistical trend, which was based on birth rate?

   Crime, black on black murder, drug addiction and abortion, which are mainly the results of poverty and the breakdown of black families, have decimated the black population.  How that gets turned around is primarily up to the black community, but it seems to me it has to start with personal redemption, saving families, and throwing off the suffocating cloak of dependency and victimhood fostered by the liberal-progressive movement of the past sixty years.
   Without sincere and rapid change, sparked by the black community and supported by the government and the rest of American society, it appears that African Americans will continue to disappear from not only baseball but from all of American life.