Basking in the glow of the crowd
A western Pennsylvania newspaper that shall not be named ran a photograph the other day of the left field stands at a packed PNC Park. It was a night game, maybe a July night, the kind of luxurious night that bathes you in warmth. The kind of night you wish would never end.
Fans were on their feet, cheering. Something spectacular had happened – a home run, a bases-clearing double – something.
The photo was so vivid I swear I could hear the roar, the eruption of enthusiasm; the loud, sustained, throaty cheer.
I wanted to be there because I had been there. Oh, maybe not on this particular night, but sometime. I wanted to be there because it would have been exhilarating. Oh, to be a part of the crowd, part of the ritual of fandom, part of a baseball moment, part of a community moment, a communal moment.
Switch scenes with me. It is now a November night. It is chilly. People are bundled against the cold in heavy coats and scarves and caps. There is a stage surrounded by people. Thousands of people. The crowd, wedged between a street and a river in downtown Pittsburgh, is several blocks long. It is difficult to move, the humanity is that thick.
A cheer goes up. The musician, long awaited, appears on stage. He begins to sing. It’s good old rock n’ roll. The crowd is into it. It is impossible not to be. It’s infectious.
There I’ve said it, or at least alluded to it. Infection. THE infection. The infection that’s keeping us home, away from work, away from relatives and friends, away from bars and restaurants. The infection that’s waylaid concerts and baseball games, any communal life, for that matter.
We are, so the saying goes, a nation of rugged individualists. But we love the communal. We love crowds. To be in a crowd gives each of us, even, I suspect, the most self-sustaining among us, a sense of belonging to the group, to the community, to the nation, to something bigger than our individual selves.
A democratic people needs that sense of things. Americans in particular.
The American people are not one people. We are many. We are old stock, new stock. We are white, black, brown. Increasingly brown. Our ancestral roots go back to England, Ireland, Italy, eastern Europe, Africa, Mexico and Central America, the Middle East, China and Vietnam, the Pacific islands.
Other nations have blood to fall back on. Not America. Not our people. We have a creed – enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. We have a system of government – encapsulated in the Constitution and sustained by the courts and the legislature and, when it functions, the executive. All of these are lubricated by free and fair elections and the interplay of politics and ideas and conflicting interests.
Not all crowds are good crowds. It was appalling a few weeks ago to see the semi-automatic rifles strapped on by protesters at the Michigan state capital in Lansing. Guns and their intimations of intimidation have no role in democratic society. It’s why we have ballots, the vote. “Right makes might.”
At the same time, the protest itself was fine. Regardless of cause, protest – the redress of grievances by the multitude – is as necessary to democracy as a balmy July night and the roar of the crowd is to baseball.
It’s true that the lone individual, standing against injustice, strengthens our democratic principles. Yet nothing is as affirming for this democratic society as people of disparate cultures and credentials coming together – at a protest or political rally, at a rock concert, at a ballgame.
“Out of many, one.”
A final word about crowds and the public good.
Harold Holzer, the great Lincoln scholar, relates that on his trip east for his inauguration, President-elect Lincoln was greeted by huge crowds, relatively speaking, at each of the dozens of places where his train stopped. (Pttsburgh was one of those places.)
In Indianapolis, the cheers were loud enough to drown out “the roar of cannon.”
“I never knew where all the people came from,” said one bedazzled brakeman, “… not only in the towns and villages, but … along the track in the country.”
At “little” Tolono, Illiinois, Lincoln was greeted with “booming cannon and cheering well-wishers.”
“I am leaving you on an errand of national importance,” Lincoln told the crowd at the depot, “attended, as you are aware, with considerable difficulties.
“Let us believe,” the soon-to-be president said, “as some poet has expressed it – Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.”
Indeed.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail. com.