Reflections on being a Cubs fan and a former Republican and this year’s pivotal midterms

Doug, great letter to the Tribune and wonderful that you can so clearly remember 1966, 56 years ago!
I agree with your assessment of the 2022 Mid-Terms. Scary the potential impact on all of us. Also, I admire your stubborn loyalty to the Cubs, but the Dodgers are a lot easier to love these days!

Thanks for sharing, Doug, and it’s great that the Chicago Tribune published the letter. Very timely! As one who became both a baseball fan and a political partisan in the same year, in my case a loyal Detroit Tiger fan and a steadfast Democrat, I resonated with the significance of the time as well as with the evolving changes that have occurred since then, necessitating reconsideration of one’s early loyalties and commitments. By chance, I happened to hear a sermon on Sunday by the minister of a church that in the 1940’s was one of the largest, most well known and wealthy mainstream Protestant churches in LA, and was presided over by an extremely conservative, doctrinaire, exclusionary minister. It is now led by a female minister of very different persuasion, liberal, open to and accepting of all people and varied belief systems. Her sermon was on evolving belief systems, how changing times, experience, and growth can effect one’s beliefs and ways of being, whether in politics, modes of expression, basic beliefs, science, whatever. Most of us have certainly experienced these evolutions, hopefully for the better. With sports loyalties, perhaps not so much. As with you, I’ve stayed committed to my original favorite, through thick and thin, and a lot of down years. Easier to be stubborn and resistant to change, I guess, when it doesn’t really matter that much!