I look at all-star games as a break in the real action. Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver is a break in civil behavior.
I admit, being able to do things outdoors limits my interest in buying a subscription in order to watch games on TV and I always seem to break my promise to go to a Twins game or a Chicago or Iowa Cubs game. Maybe this year. Boycotts are as ineffective as this column in changing anything so I might go this year.
The big news in the All-Star Game this summer is the move. Commissioner, Robert D. Manfred, Jr. decided that Atlanta was not suited to host the All-Star Game because Georgia passed a law attempting to ensure votes counted from legitimate voters.
Let’s take a look at Georgia’s sin. Why is a photo ID such a big deal? If the vote is such a big deal, it seems like there could be no argument here. Both states require it. Both states also forbid offering food or drink near polling places. Would I change my vote for a steak dinner? A careful reading of election laws in Georgia and Colorado find there’s really very little in either that could be construed as voter suppression.
The new law has spawned an epidemic of fake moral superiority. CEOs of Atlanta based companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, apparently without reading the law, came out with new programs and incessant whining about voter suppression. Coca-Cola is providing re-education for workers that include pleas for them to be “less white.”
In Congress yesterday debate has started on reparations for descendants of slavery. Anyone who has dealt with the federal government can’t imagine how this recipient or that donor could ever be proven as equitable participants in such a program. Should the CEO of Coca-Cola pay reparations for their support of the Ku Klux Klan 100 years ago? Should interest be calculated for the extra 50 years since slavery was supposedly eliminated?
Who does MLB punish with their decision? A city that is 56% black will lose $100 million in revenue to a city that is 10% black.
The main feature of the discussion of race today is the hypocrisy. Coke and Delta both have a major presence in China where there is no voting at all and minorities are murdered or put in concentration camps. The hypocrisy even filters down to supposedly grass-roots organizations like Black Lives Matters, where its self-proclaimed “trained Marxist” co-founder just bought her fourth home for $1.4 million in Topanga Canyon.
The hypocrisy that is broadly overlooked is the arrogant idea that minorities need special privileges as if they really are inferior. In daily life and the real world we each relate to each other as human beings, not as classifications. Those people in the corporate offices and on major media are really missing out on the beauty of honest human interaction. If I get to a live game this year, I look forward to meeting the people in the seats nearby.
*In Iowa you can’t vote if you can’t attend.
alternativebyfritz 
Why would anyone today who possesses a modicum of intelligence engage in a waste-of-time endeavor as voting? Have we learned nothing from the 2020 Presidential election? I’m quite sure that the 2020 voting experience, or vote counting, will be carried forward into many future elections.
As to baseball, I once read a book with the title, “The Quickest Baseball Game.” It went on for 1,486 pages. For me, baseball and basketball are “bush league” sports — pun intended.
Good remarks re: reparations and the hypocrisy among the virtue signaling corporations regarding race and voting laws. The latter remark re: corporations is lost on most of the population of today, a group with moribund intelligence and low octane thinking skills.
Well, there are “human beings” and then there are human beings. Culture and ethnic heritage can make for huge differences. And yes, all of this condescending, sanctimonious verbiage directed at minorities, and blacks in particular, most definitely is a statement of minority and black inferiority. And by extension, and writing from a collective standpoint, does that not make whites, ipso facto, supremacists to minorities, or at least to those non-Asian and non-Ashkenazi Jews.
The guy who cleans our swimming pool is from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and received his U.S. citizenship a few years ago. Does not that make him an African American?