BASKETBALL FANS
We were all sorts of people at Sunday night’s game, which in South Carolina, a conservative state, were probably evenly divided between MAGA Republicans and Liberal Democrats. But it didn‘t matter. We were all religions and races and gender and levels of education. We were the ethnic mix that makes up the United States and for tonight none of our intensely felt divisions mattered. We were simply fellow Americans directing all our passion and intensity to the bounce of an orange ball within the arbitrary lines of a basketball court and a hoop, that when the game was first invented in 1891, was a peach basket nailed to a gym balcony, a game that was made up by James Naismith, a physical education teacher, to give boys a sport to play during the winter months, a game safer to play than football. Better to take out our passion and aggression out, to scream and cheer, in this harmless game than to direct it at each other as happens so often all around us and in distant places like Ukraine.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 