Author Archives: Mark M. Meinero

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0 – ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

For ten weeks, I’ve looked at the changes in the world over the course of my life, which is exactly 70 years long as of the moment this posts on the blog.

Change usually doesn’t happen quickly. We often tend to think of our existence as getting through another day. It doesn’t seem exciting or even seem to be a change at all. Then you think about it and wonder when everybody started drinking bottled water.

The premise of these about-to-be 71 pieces was imagining what it would be like to tell my parents about what would happen in my lifetime and their response to it. And perhaps what I’ve enjoyed most about doing this is channeling my parents, who aren’t here to see this; it has been a joy in my imagination.

To be honest, I think my Dad would scoff at a lot of what I’ve described; my Mom not so much. Some of what has transpired since 1954 would seem like science fiction or bad political drama to people of that time.

But change has come. And it wasn’t just the 70 things I described. I can think of a bunch of ideas that I couldn’t get into this countdown or thought about after I had set the list.

Often people my age or older get nostalgic for the past, aka, the good old days. They seem to think things were better back when – when we were kids, when we were teens, when we became young adults, and so on.

The extreme of this is the MAGA movement. It’s only partially due to Trump, who has masterfully exploited it. It’s mostly due to some notion that there was a better time than now, probably back in the 1950s and 1960s when they were kids or young adults.

It wasn’t a better time. Even if you’re a white male, whose privilege gave you an advantage over the rest of the population. We eat better and more interesting stuff. We have a wider array of entertainment. There are sports teams in more major cities. Certain diseases have been eradicated and others have better treatments that offer easier and longer management.

We’re a better society when everyone participates. And the idea that more people can, whether because of law or science, is a positive.

But not everything is better.

Social media is a way to communicate with friends – or among people with horrific ideas. Plastic makes things lighter and cheaper – and is almost impossible to degrade. We can do amazing things with a computer or smartphone – or disengage at the dinner table and in a theater. There’s more to entertain us – and some of it is garbage.

The future is not linear. It really is two steps forward and one step back. Not everything will get better right away. 

And some terrible things are persistent: racism, cancer, war, religious bigotry, radical nationalism, ignorance, misogyny and more.

But even they are not intractable. I won’t see 2094 (or maybe there will be some breakthrough in the next few years that will allow me to live to 140). However, I’m confident and hopeful that the world will be a better place. In part because of the things we do and work on now. 

My plan is to revise this countdown in 2034 to see what progress has been made in the next decade. In the meantime, with some of the rest of you, I’m going to begin enjoying my septuagenerian status.

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1 – THE WHOLE WORLD IN YOUR HANDS

How I spent my Saturday:

I set an alarm for 7 a.m., playing Miles Davis’ “So What”

I checked the weather forecast.

I bought a train ticket

I told my son, who was staying with a friend in Brooklyn and with whom I used to routinely spend 3 hours on a video chat when he was in Seoul, that I was leaving for a Met game.

I looked to see if there was traffic on the way to the train parking lot.

I bought a scone and an Easter surprise for my family at a bakery.

I checked to see what time the next train was coming. 

I boarded the train and showed the conductor the ticket.

I listened to songs associated with the Mets.

I played a variation of Mille Bornes, the French road race game. 

I checked my recipe for Chateaubriand that I made for Easter dinner to see if I needed any other ingredients. I had already ordered the demi glace concentrate for the sauce.

I wrote down the missing ingredients I needed.

I boarded a New York City subway train.

I checked to see what was going on in the news.

I got to Citi Field and told my son I’d meet him at the subway station.

I followed him as he went from Brooklyn to Flushing, just as I followed my daughter when she flew from Los Angeles to New York last week.

I met him and we walked to the ballpark, where he’s working this season.

I went for an hour-long walk in Flushing Meadow Park and recorded how far I went and how long it took me.

I entered the Met game with my ticket.

I texted my son to tell him I’d meet him at Shake Shack; I didn’t tell him I dislocated a pinky in a fall at the ballpark gate. (Not everything has to be done right away)

I bought a chicken parm sandwich and a bottle of water.

I kept score of the game, which the Mets lost 7-6.

I took pictures of him working at the game, then sent them to him, his mother and sister.

He told me where to meet him after the game outside the ballpark.

Got back on the subway.

Bought dinner at a Manhattan diner.

Called my wife to tell her about the dislocated pinky. She wasn’t happy.

My son took a picture of me walking down a street for a project.

Got on the train for home.

Listened to a playlist of songs by artists from California.

Checked to see if I wanted to purchase and download any new songs.

Played Mille Bornes again.

Unlocked my car doors. Started the motor to warm up the car.

Used a flashlight to see my way through my lightless garage.

Showed my wife all the pictures of our son taken that afternoon.

Here’s what would stun anyone alive in 1954:

Every single thing on the above list was done on a device the size of a dollar bill.

We are coming to the point that we take smartphones for granted. But they are an amazing achievement of the human race – and the smart version of cellphones have been around for less than 20 years.

It’s estimated that three-quarters of the world has smartphones. The world has 8 billion people. Do the math.

Or, better yet, let your smartphone do it. There’s probably a calculator on there too.

Smartphones are the thing that would have stunned my parents the most in April 1954. There have been a lot of amazing things that I have discussed over the past 10 weeks, but smartphones take the cake.

 A cake you can order from a bakery in Minneapolis on your smartphone.

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2 – ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Marriage had already changed a lot through the first half of the 20th century.

By 1954, the idea of arranged marriage – your parents selecting your spouse – had pretty much ended. Many of the early 20th century immigrants, from every part of the world, had brought the idea to America.

The idea that superseded it, of course, was love. It sometimes bothered older people that younger people chose their spouse on that basis. But that’s how it worked.

One of the reasons for arranged marriages was the notion of keeping your tribe intact. A mixed marriage in an Italian family was when somebody from Venice married someone from Sicily.

But that, too, began to change as Americans began to intermingle with people of different backgrounds. Irish and Italian. Polish and Spanish. German and Greek.

There remained some taboos. The first was race.

It was all right, supposedly, for white people to marry white people, Black people to marry Black people, Asians to marry other Asians, and so on. 

Interracial marriage caused people to gasp. And the words used to describe it had negative bias: Miscegenation. Mongrelization. Octaroon.  In some states, any form of interracial marriage, but particularly Black and white marriage, was illegal.

Yet, as time passed, love prevailed.

People just married who they wanted anyway. And, finally, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Virginia law barring interracial relationships, specifically in the case of the appropriately named Mildred and Richard Loving.

Interracial marriage produced mixed-race children, who seemed unbothered by the idea. As of the 2020 Census, more than 10% of the nation’s population says it is multiracial. 

One of those people became President of the United States.

And, of course, two of them are my children, who have been telling people since they were tweens that they were Chitalian.

The final taboo didn’t fall until this century. 

People of the same sex have loved each other since we evolved into humans. But often it has been looked on as some kind of sin, as if a loving sexual relationship between two people could not possibly involve two men or two women.

But some brave people said the hell with that. They not only wanted to share their love with the person they loved, they wanted everyone to know and respect it. 

So they fought for the right of people of the same sex to marry each other. 

It’s an idea that seemed impossible when this century began, just a few years after an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as between one man and one woman. President Bill Clinton complained about the law. But given the veto-proof majorities in both houses, he acquiesced and signed it.

That didn’t stop love.

The idea of same-sex marriage was not popular even as recently as 2008, when California narrowly approved a state constitutional amendment banning it. But that amendment proved to be the basis of legal appeals, and then state referenda and legislative action.

Until, in 2015, the Supreme Court – in Obergefell v. Hodges – ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote of those seeking the right to marry: “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

And that ruling gave people like my daughter a chance to be happy.

Seventy years after my birth, my family would have startled my parents had they known what was coming. But, in the end, they’re exactly like us, because they were bonded by one thing that no arrangement or prejudice can overcome.

Love.

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3 – THE SHAME

I’m proud to be an American.

People from everywhere converged here – by choice or not – to form a country, one of the most influential and powerful in the world. We encourage imagination. We are more than the sum of our parts – and more than any one part alone. We gave the world jazz, baseball and drive-in movies. Miles Davis, Babe Ruth and Meryl Streep.

But in the last 70 years, one thing has been to our everlasting shame.

Mass murder with guns.

People were probably always able to walk into a place and start shooting; the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was 95 years ago. But especially since the 1960s, the number of horrific multiple killings – of people seemingly at random who had no idea they were targets – has grown wildly.

The first in this trend was the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas. A sniper climbed the Main Building tower and shot away for more than 90 minutes before being killed by police.

The 15 people murdered that day was the most fatalities in a mass shooting – a record that did not last long.

The killer in that case might have had brain tumor issues that contributed to his violence. One would think that, particularly with something as lethal as a gun, making sure people with such problems are not given access to sophisticated weaponry.

Right. (use sarcastic tone)

About as long as these shootings have increased, forces who support unlimited firearms have been not just pushing back against regulations, but loosening them and making it easier to get guns.

They cower behind the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The one that starts “A well regulated Militia…” As if that would fit the description of who these people are.

At the same time, the weapons have become more sophisticated in terrible ways. The weapon of choice in mass killings is often the ArmaLite Rifle-15 (that’s what AR stands for) or its copycats, a semi-automatic weapon that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute with devastating power.

This confluence of events has led to a travesty. There is no place in the United States safe from anyone with a warped idea of revenge, justice, societal change or fun.

Grocery stores. Movie theaters. Hospitals. Nightclubs. Places of worship. Workplaces. Post offices. Concerts. Parades.

All are horrific. But the places that strike me as the most depraved and obscene are schools.

The murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 should have been the last straw. Someone decided to kill kids and educators that day, after first killing his mother. Most of the victims were in kindergarten and first grade.

There was revulsion and there were tears. Tears galore. There were thoughts and there were prayers.

What there wasn’t was anything done.

Two states, Connecticut and New York, took steps to limit semi-automatic weapons. But the federal government, despite President Barack Obama’s eloquent, heartfelt plea, did nothing.

Because members of Congress – of both parties, but Republicans especially – took their marching orders from a bag of pus and puke that headed the National Rifle Association. 

That had the unmitigated gall to tell the world that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

These shootings take place with hundreds of well-trained law enforcement personnel present. Or none. It doesn’t seem to matter. 

To add insult to injury, there were other worthless trash bags going around saying shootings like this were hoaxes aimed at taking away Americans’ guns; that the mourning parents were actors and the incident never happened.

If this nation couldn’t act when 5-year-olds were murdered, it seems like a reach to believe there’s anything that will make this nightmare end. 

That doesn’t mean we should stop trying. It’s not about ending the Second Amendment because, believe it or not, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with this. This is just greed, selfishness and a lack of respect. 

It would do nothing to end Americans’ rights if we banned weapons that kill a lot of people in a short time, if only because those people being killed had a right to live that supersedes even the Constitution.

I would be proud to be able to say our home is the safest place in the world. Can’t say that right now.

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4 – LIQUIDITY

My Dad never let not knowing the words to a song stop him from singing it.

But in the case of one song, he wasn’t that far off.

Whenever he would do any hard physical work, or when we wanted a soda or juice, he would sing these lines from a song covered by one of his favorites, Frankie Laine:

“Don’t you listen to him, Dan

He’s a devil, not a man

And he’s burning in the sand

For water

Cool, clear water”

That is not exactly the lyric. But that’s not the point.

The point is that he was ahead of his time in the hydration movement. No adult I’ve known has been as good as he was as having a glass of water whenever he needed it.

But even the 1954 version of Dad would find it odd that, in 2024, just about everyone carries water with them.

Military personnel and campers used to carry canteens, those round cloth-covered containers. Bicycle riders sometimes had bottles attached to their bike’s frame.

The idea of going to the store and buying one 20-ounce bottle or a case of them is relatively modern. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think about when it became widespread.

I suppose one reason is that people were less trusting of their municipal water systems. I live in a place where the tap water is awful. It really can’t be imbibed unless it’s run through some kind of filter – for us, in the refrigerator or through a purification system.

Another reason is that the two biggest soft-drink companies – Coke and Pepsi – both invested heavily in bottled water. Pepsi introduced Aquafina in 1994; five years later, Coke’s Dasani arrived. Both are basically municipal water that has been filtered. There are some regional brands that sell bottled spring water.

And, as I mentioned, people have been made much more conscious about dehydration. It exacerbates diseases and illnesses, and brings on some of its own.

Hydration was also the impetus for one of the other inventions of our lifetime: sports drinks. 

In 1965, scientists at the University of Florida were asked by the school’s football coach to develop something that would restore nutrients and minerals to an athlete’s tired body. The school’s teams are the Gators, hence Gatorade. Four years later, it was marketed to the public; my Mom said it tasted like sweat and there’s probably something to that.

Like just about everything else on this list, bottled water and other drinks are not an unmitigated blessing. 

It usually comes in a plastic bottle, and when those bottles are exposed to sunlight, they can leach the chemicals that make up the plastic into the water. Microplastics have been blamed for diseases of their own.

There’s also the problem of what to do with all these bottles. Much as we discussed with plastic bags, they seem to end up all over – particularly in places that don’t offer some sort of financial or legal incentive for recycling them. Coke has indicated it will try to get Dasani into bioplastic bottles that are more environmentally friendly; it’s also using cans, which frankly is not a great way to drink water.

This world still has public drinking fountains. You can still get a glass of tap water in a restaurant.

But when you walk down the street or go to a sporting event, you can count on almost everybody having a bottle of water.

It might not be cool. It might not be clear. But it sure is water.

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5 – T AND R ARE THE FIRST TWO LETTERS

My parents, especially my Mom, were big fans of the political dramas of the 1950s and ’60s.

“Advise & Consent,” “Seven Days in May,” “Fail Safe,” “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Best Man” were all movies they either watched at the movies or when they came on TV.

But in this era of malevolent reality TV (unlike “Queen for a Day” and “This Is Your Life” in the ’50s), the show that unfolded on January 6, 2021 was a political drama that frightened the hell out of half the country.

A mob came to the United States Capitol to thwart the will of the American people, who had voted two months earlier to elect Joe Biden as President of the United States. It came perilously close to capturing some of its targets, including Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both of whom would likely have been murdered had the thugs gotten their hands on them.

Five people died within two days of the attack, from causes ranging from a gunshot to a stress-induced heart attack. Four police officers, who were overwhelmed by the crowd, committed suicide shortly after.

The images of the attack were stunning: the mob smashing through the windows and doors, beating police officers with clubs, occupying the Senate chamber and destroying property.

But what would have bewildered anyone in 1954 – anyone at any time in American history, perhaps even the Civil War – was that the violence and chaos, the attempted coup, was triggered by the sitting president.

Maybe that’s a little overstated. The idea that a losing incumbent president would seek a violent return to power might have been buried in our minds’ recesses. It’s what happens in countries where the political institutions respect power more than government, might over civility.

It’s just that we never thought it could happen here. We believed Americans were better than that – that our tradition of peaceful transfer, George Washington’s great gift, was still strong in its third century.

Instead, it was as fragile as the ego of a conman.

Donald Trump probably didn’t expect to win the presidency. He’s always been looking for a buck, especially since he’s not particularly good at managing or keeping them. He probably figured there was a way to make big real estate licensing deals or sell crappy branded products by running.

But he won. He appealed to the anger of people who feel elites are ruining the country – forgetting the fact that he’s always claimed to be among the elitest (that’s not a typo) of them all. 

Trump claimed to be a great businessman, despite filing for bankruptcy multiple times. He claimed to be unbigoted, despite a family history of racism. He claimed to be the voice of those who’ve served in the military, despite calling them “suckers” and “losers” in private.

Winning the presidency probably multiplied the self-aggrandizing in his head. And it led to a disastrous term in office. Losing the respect of our allies. Dividing the nation over immigration and race. Kowtowing to dictators like Putin and Kim Jong-Un. And his crowning achievement, mismanaging the worst pandemic in our lifetime.

Trump and his henchman seeded the crowd on January 6, organizing the rally that started the chaos and making sure that opposition to them was weakened. He told his followers that “…if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

And then they marched to the Capitol with their obscene flagpoles, their knives, their bear spray, their Mace. They literally and figuratively defecated on American democracy.

Brave men and women stopped them. What we owe the defenders of the Capitol on Jan. 6 can never be paid in full. 

Brave men and women continue to try to stop them. They’re prosecuting the participants and their record is spectacular. They’re the people in news organizations countering the stupidity with the truth. They’re lawmakers and officials, some of them spurned by their fellow Republicans, seeking to show what really happened and do whatever they can to prevent it from happening again.

But treason isn’t so easily put out. It has been 159 years since the South lost the Civil War – and some people still believe the Confederate flag is still something to revere. Trump is running again – and there are polls showing the possibility that this disgrace of a human being could win.

My parents didn’t live to see January 6. But I’m maudlin enough to think they and our other ancestors watched over us that day. Hopefully, they’ll continue to keep us safe from treason – whose first two letters are not the only thing in common with Trump.

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6 – NOPE, NO GREEN CHEESE

Here’s a strange thing about one of the human race’s greatest achievement: Putting people on the moon almost seems as far-fetched in 2024 as it did in 1954.

It hasn’t happened in more than a half-century – the last U.S. Apollo mission ended in December 1972. So there are whole generations of people who have never known first hand what it’s like to see men – yes, they were all men – on the lunar surface.

But the idea of manned space flight – or space flight of any kind – wasn’t particularly widespread 70 years ago. The closest thing to it were the rockets launched by Germany against Britain in World War II – and the scientists who created those rockets were divided between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Three years after I was born, the Soviets launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik. The U.S. had been working on space flight as well, but the urgency – in light of the Cold War between the two nations – grew with the launch.

The Soviets were also the first ones to put a human in space, Yuri Gagarin, in early 1961. About a month later, Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight – he went up and came down – put the U.S. in the space race.

After that, President John F. Kennedy spelled out the nation’s goal – putting an American on the moon by the end of 1969. 

It happened, after years of triumph and heartbreak. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface and, early the next day in UTC, walked on it.

There were more 500 million people watching them on live television. Seeing it was as much a marvel to us as the idea of being there. Everyone in my family stayed up late – the moon walk began at 10:56 p.m. ET on the 20th and lasted past midnight.  We watched something that was wondrous to my parents and amazing but expected to me, my brother and sister.

After the final Apollo mission, there was not nearly the motivation to either go back to the moon or to another planet, Mars or Venus. The focus went to building the International Space Station, a United States-Russia collaboration with assistance from several other nations. There have been missions to some pretty deep parts of outer space, but nobody’s been on them.

That’s likely to change in the next few years. The United States is planning a return to the moon in 2026. Japan and India are looking to send people to the moon in 2028. And, in 2029 or 2030, China – in consortium with other nations – plans a manned mission to the satellite. That’s not to mention the plans to go to other planets that have been bandied about.

Because it has been so long and the level of crazy in our world has hardly abated, there are those among us who think that the lunar missions were faked. 

Back when I was a kid, the moon was depicted as being made of green cheese. That’s obviously not true – you can see some rocks picked off the surface at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, among other places.

But it’s more likely that there’s green cheese on the moon than anyone elaborately faked what Armstrong called “one giant leap for mankind.” And given the lives lost in pursuit of this dream, blithely labeling the moon landings a hoax is incredibly disrespectful.

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7 – TALL BUILDINGS

In 1954, the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world.

But by 1973, New York had two taller buildings: The twin towers of the World Trade Center.

They were kind of lackluster architecture. If they weren’t so tall, they wouldn’t have drawn much attention, looking like all the other straight, white or glass towers being built throughout the world.

It was their location that distinguished them. They stood slightly apart from the cluster of buildings in lower Manhattan, close to the Hudson River.

So when there was a picture that was supposed to say “New York” instantly, it was the picture of the towers against a backdrop of either New Jersey or the rest of Manhattan.

Unfortunately, those pictures of New York’s skyline inspired a Saudi madman who wasn’t even around in 1954.

Osama bin Laden, born three years after me, hated the United States for a number of reasons: its support of Israel, its perceived decadence that went counter to his warped conception of Islam, the fact that these evil Americans used Saudi Arabia as a base for countering Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s incursion into Kuwait.

bin Laden saw the pictures and saw a target. Through the planning of his henchman and 19 suckers who would carry out the act, four U.S. jetliners were sent careening toward prominent buildings. 

One hit the Pentagon, killing 184 people. One was taken down in a Pennsylvania field through the intervention of the plane’s passengers, some of the bravest people in American history.

And two hit the Trade Center, causing them to collapse to rubble and killing more than 2,700 people, all of whom were either just going about their business or were safety workers – policemen and firemen – trying heroically to save lives.

Like the Kennedy Assassination, we know where we were on September 11, 2001. We remember the horrible feeling about who were lost and the fact that some spoiled brat terrorist could find a weak spot – because how callous do you have to be to kill like that?

9/11 shook us all and changed this country. At first, the country came together to mourn and comfort our friends and family.

But the reaction to September 11 took a dark turn. We became security mad and turned airline travel into among the more unpleasant experiences. We didn’t trust anyone, and created a wave of anti-Islamic hatred that lingers.

President George W. Bush, at first an inspirational figure who promised to take down the people who took down the buildings, didn’t get bin Laden. But he did lead the U.S. to get rid of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11, leaving 4,500 American soldiers dead.

Even the most prominent hero of the day, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, ended up with a tarnished legacy through his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump – who bragged on 9/11 that his building was now the tallest in lower Manhattan.

So yes, the attack was a shock, something unthinkable the day I was born. In fact, even after actually seeing it happen, we find it unthinkable that anyone could conceive of something so evil.

My Dad worked in the World Trade Center for a few years just after it opened. It was an awful location to commute to from Long Island, particularly after the collapse of a portion of the West Side Elevated Highway in 1973. His company, Firestone, moved the office after only a short time.

One of the things I found in my parents’ house after they died was the key to Dad’s office in the  WTC. It’s stamped “WORLD TRADE CENTER. DO NOT DUPLICATE.”

It’s now one of the most tangible pieces left of what were once the tallest buildings in the world.

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8 – THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

On the day I was born, the mother of the 44th President of the United States was a 12-year-old in El Dorado, Kansas.

Even Stanley Ann Dunham might have found the fact that she would be the mother of the nation’s first Black president bewildering. 

But she did. On Groundhog Day in 1961, she married Barack Obama Sr., a classmate at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and the first African student in the school’s history. That summer they had a son.

How did Barack Obama become president?

In 1954, a Black man wouldn’t have had a chance. The idea would have seemed impossible – even to Black people themselves, who weren’t able to use unsegregated public facilities in much of the country.

Black men and women had run before. But their candidacies were more about advocacy than actually getting the nomination. 

Shirley Chisholm was a congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking to make a statement about a new generation of Americans. Jesse Jackson won some primaries but couldn’t overcome the dominance of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Gary Hart in 1988. Al Sharpton ran a spirited campaign in 2004 in an effort to advance the policies he advocated.

It was in 2004 that America was introduced to Obama. He had graduated from Harvard Law and published the least likely book any future president ever wrote, “Dreams from My Father,” about his struggles as a boy in Hawaii and Indonesia. 

But his main gift was his ability to speak. If Barack Obama isn’t the greatest orator in American history (yeah, I know about Lincoln), he’s certainly the greatest in our lifetime. He’ll always hold a special place in my heart as the commencement speaker for my son’s graduation in 2016.

Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston propelled him. He was elected U.S. senator from Illinois and, four years later, he stunned presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton to win his party’s nomination.

There were other things going for him.

He was lucky. Obama came to the fore when the nation was going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and after George W. Bush dragged the nation through an unnecessary military action in Iraq. 

Obama was relatively young. He was 47 when he ran and seemed a lot younger; not many men his age in public life are willing to be photographed bare-chested in the Hawaiian surf. He was in terrific physical condition and that vitality spread to his campaign. And he knew how to talk to young people in contrast to the awkwardness of most politicians.

He also understood how the world was changing. In particular, Obama and his campaign had a feel for the emerging world of social media – Facebook and Twitter were in their first years.

My Mom, after initial disappointment that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t become America’s first female president, came to love Obama. She watched him every time he showed up on MSNBC and had a huge campaign poster in her bedroom.

What seems wistful now is how optimistic people who supported him were in 2008. I downloaded a bunch of songs from iTunes extolling his virtues. Their theme is the joy that this man would unify the country and show that the nation was moving past the bigotry of the past.

But, instead, it almost seems as though the forces of backwardness dozed in 2008, perhaps numbed by the financial crisis, and woke up with a venegance the next year. The Tea Party. Denying that Obama was born in the United States. The phony fiscal concern. 

As amazing as it is that Barack Obama became president, it’s almost more shocking that his successor was someone so completely different and anathema to what Obama represented.

The path from the audacity of hope of 2008 to the fear of democracy’s end in 2024 is painful and urgent. Stanley Ann Dunham would hope we would choose the optimism she instilled in her son.

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9 – MEET THE METS

My parents, both baseball fans, knew when I was born that I would root for a team from New York.

I’m sure they expected it to be their team, the Yankees. The Yanks had just won the World Series for the fifth straight year. And given the Italian heritage of the team – Lazzeri, Crosetti, DiMaggio, Rizzuto and Berra – it seemed likely.

My Dad had grown up in Brooklyn and been to his share of Dodger games, especially during World War II when kids got in for bringing old tires or scrap metal to the gate. He had a soft spot for them – they were the team of Duke Snider, Carl Furillo and Jackie Robinson. And they were pretty good, having won the past two National League pennants.

Neither of my parents were fond of the Giants, who played in Manhattan across the Harlem River from the Yankees. But the Giants had inspired all of baseball in 1951 when Bobby Thomson’s famous home run capped a spectacular comeback. And they were getting their young phenom, Willie Mays, back from two years in the military.

So which of those three teams would the new gleam of their eye cheer for when he turned 70 years old in 2024?

Meet the Mets.

No, kids, the Mets did not exist in 1954 – although you could have confused them with the hapless Washington Senators of Douglas Wallop’s best-selling novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” which was in the process of becoming a Broadway musical.

New York baseball fans did not imagine that the Dodgers and Giants would leave. Maybe the Giants, although they won the World Series in 1954 with the help of Mays’ play known simply as “The Catch ” Brooklyn loved the Dodgers and Ebbets Field, the bandbox where they played, and that bond seemed unbreakable.

But Walter O’Malley – who bought the Dodgers in 1950 – wanted a new, modern stadium – and he wanted it in downtown Brooklyn, where the Barclays Center arena is today. The city, in the person of “Master Builder” Robert Moses, offered him a place in Flushing instead, thinking O’Malley was bluffing about moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles. 

Bad call, Bob. O’Malley took the team west – and convinced Giants owner Horace Stoneham to go to San Francisco.

From 1958 through 1961, New York had one team. The Yankees. But there were way too many National League fans for that to last too long. After a lot of threats to form a third league, New York was granted a franchise to begin playing in 1962.

There were a lot of things that made the Mets attractive to me. They were building a stadium very close to where we lived in Flushing. My Dad took me to the ground breaking for what would become Shea Stadium in 1961. 

And then, when Yogi Berra was fired as manager after the Yanks won the pennant but lost the World Series in 1964, that was it. My grandfather and I were Mets fans.

Being a Mets fan is a lot harder than being a Yankees fan. A lot. Mets fans have suffered through some of the worst baseball ever played. The team still holds the modern record for the worst season ever – 40 wins, 120 losses in 1962. There are a lot more losing seasons than winning ones. Yes, there’s the occasional miracle – see 1969 – but heartbreak is the default mode.

And we’re fatalistic to a flaw. 

One time, my Mom and I were watching a game entering the ninth inning with the Mets up 4-2. I said “Goodbye, Mom.” And she responded, “How can you leave? Don’t you want to see them win?”

I said. “No, I don’t want to see them lose.”

My mother was too used to rooting for a team with Mariano Rivera as its closer. “Oh, ye of little faith. Stay and watch them win.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll stay to prove my point.”

Which the Mets did. Final score: San Francisco 5, Mets 4.

But it’s also a lot more fun to be a Mets fan. When we’re winning, we’re happy and loud, full of braggadocio for a team that more often doesn’t have much. Met fans brought clever banners to the ballpark and embraced quirky players from Marvelous Marv Throneberry to Daniel Vogelbach. They’re the team of Hayden “Sidd” Finch and Chico Escuela, who don’t really exist, but the Mets went along with the joke. 

It seems like work to be a Yankee fan – if the team doesn’t win the World Series, the whole year is an abysmal failure.

So let Los Angeles have the Dodgers. Let San Francisco have the Giants. Let the Bronx have its Bombers. They might have all been here in 1954, but two of them are gone now.

We have the Mets. LGM!

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