I am sitting here watching Alabama football on a Saturday night, and thinking about America.
Not politics, not polls, not the endless arguments that have become the background noise of our lives.
I am thinking about the thousands of people sitting in that stadium, the band playing, the students standing shoulder to shoulder, families wearing their colors, people cheering for something they have cared about for years.
Earlier today there were soccer fields crowded with parents and grandparents watching little boys and girls run up and down a field.
My great-grandson Georgie was one of them, seven years old, caught up in the importance of his game.
Then there is baseball, and the Chicago Cubs. I haven’t been able to see the games easily from Nashville, North Carolina, but that hasn’t kept me from following this wonderful season, checking scores, reading what happened, pleased all over again when they win.
There is something about having a team that belongs to the geography of your life, a team carried with you even after you have moved far away.
Across the country, millions of people understand exactly what I mean. Their team may be different, but the attachment is much the same.
I know there are people who couldn’t care less about sports. That isn’t really my point. What interests me is what these scenes say about us. We hear so much about what is wrong with America. The anger is loud, the criticism relentless, and if we aren’t careful we begin to believe that contention is the whole story.
Then comes a Saturday.The parking lots fill. The grills are lit. The marching bands take the field. Children pull on soccer jerseys. Someone’s grandfather settles into his stadium seat. Someone checks the baseball score on a phone. People cheer, groan, laugh, complain about the referee, and hope together.
For a little while, the great national argument becomes smaller. America is still there beneath all the noise. It is there in traditions handed from one generation to another, in the Cubs cap a grandfather gives a child, in the college song everybody somehow knows by heart, in the seven-year-old racing down a soccer field while his family calls his name.
These things do not make every problem come rightBut they remind me that not everything is wrong.
There is an America that television panels and angry headlines can never completely explain. It is being lived every day in stadiums and schoolyards, around kitchen tables, in church pews, at county fairs, on front porches and neighborhood streets. Sometimes it takes a Saturday night football game to remind me of it. The country is still here.
And so are we.
