Random Lockdown Thoughts, pt.1

The 2005 White Sox happened.

It’s worth repeating because no World Series champion is forgotten more easily and more often than the 2005 White Sox. Obviously a lot of that has to do with the Red Sox winning the year before. But, the thing is, the Red Sox were consistently good in the late-’90s and early-2000s and 2004 was their fifth playoff appearance in 10 years so, for all of the catharsis that so many felt when they did finally win, it still sort of felt like an inevitable conclusion. The White Sox, on the other hand, were a solid team in the early 2000s but were making only their fifth playoff appearance since 1919 when they finally won the title. The White Sox winning the World Series was truly astonishing and it deserves better.

It’s easy to think that the Red Sox finally breaking their 86-year drought marked some sort of turning point in baseball, and maybe from the perspective of analytics becoming mainstream it is. But it was the White Sox breaking their 88-year drought the very next year that, at least to me, confirmed that baseball as we knew it had changed, even if it was almost immediately ignored and eventually forgotten.

Towards the beginning of Apollo 13, Tom Hanks’ character Jim Lovell stares up at the moon, knowing that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are walking on it as he stands there in his backyard. Eventually, Lovell’s wife comes outside and he tells her something that has stuck with me ever since I first saw the film: “From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. It’s not a miracle. We just decided to go.” In the anti-intellectual America that we have created we often over-value folksy proverbs at the expense of actual expertise, but the profundity of what Hanks’ character says with those three simple lines cannot be overstated. For in them he recognises humanity’s telos. The moment Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon we had achieved something that was considered not merely impossible (unachievable) but implausible (unthinkable).

Unthinkable.

Then we decided to go.

And in that moment we lived up to all our potential. Everything that had happened before was past. We were living in a different era. Alpha and Omega. We became gods.

I don’t know what it’s like to live in a world where man has not walked on the moon, but I knew a world pre-covid, just like I knew a world pre-9/11. When I was 18 I thought eventually things would get back to normal. Now I know that would have been impossible. It almost seems silly to compare this pandemic with 9/11. So many more people have died, all over the world, that to continue to talk about 9/11 at this point almost feels like wilful navel-gazing. The future will be post-covid, not post-9/11.

When covid-19 first appeared the general consensus was that within 18 months there would be a vaccine and the world would go back to normal. Now reports suggest the possibility that we’ll never find a vaccine, that the world as we knew it in January 2020 is gone forever. Perhaps we weren’t as lucky as everyone who was alive on July 20, 1969. Perhaps we entered into a new era without realising it.

But we went to the moon. And the White Sox won a World Series.