"It doesn't matter, you're going to lose."
I was lucky enough to attend a great small liberal arts college. Small campus, hard to get into, more National Merit Scholars in my entering class than any other school in the country.
The P.E. requirement was to make sure everyone got some exercise and weren't just scholar robots, and there were plenty of great options to choose from. One was to get together a softball team and enter the intramural league.
It was a heck of a lot of fun. For the most part.
But one day, me and by friends found ourselves scheduled against a team that wasn't like the ones we had faced previously. Even an elite private college offers athletic scholarships, as it should. It just turned out that this team was put together of men with that distinction. And that this particular combination of guys, who were certainly successful at competition in their sports, didn't seem to see the distinction between intramural sports for P.E. credit and competitive interscholastic sports.
So me and my skinny geeky friends weren't classmates; we were jokes.
It wasn't a surprise that they took the lead right away, and stayed ahead. What was a surprise was how they handled it. They openly laughed at our efforts, and loudly traded jokes between themselves about our pitiful attempts to even compete.
At first we were taken aback, and couldn't believe that they were actually aggressively taunting us in a game between classmates. But their disdain for us "losers" was being hammered home (so to speak). After a few innings, they laughingly asked if we wouldn't rather just give up. But we were there to play nine innings of softball, for the exercise, fun, and credit.
They didn't think we would notice when they chose the softer of the two balls to pitch to us. We weren't great (or even good) hitters, but they took the opportunity to use the softer ball so they wouldn't have to run as much to get anything we managed to hit.
But at one point, just wanting to see the game that we were obviously going to lose played fairly, I asked the pitcher on the other team to please pitch the other ball.
After a pause to pretend that he didn't know there was a difference, he laughed and said, "It doesn't matter, you're still going to lose."
I do believe that Hillary Clinton will be a good president, despite my reservations about things like trusting Henry Kissinger (wtf!) and lack of focus on Wall Street reform and institutional changes to reverse the way the field has been tilted over the last 45 years so that the benefits of prosperity are funneled purposely to the very top of the 1%. I also believe that she is better than much of the trash-talking triumphalism in the discourse of many of her supporters.
I need to believe that.
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