Friday, May 24, 2013
"When Place Is Not Enough"
I have a complicated friendship with the whole "Front Porch Republic / New Urbanism / Crunchy-Con / critique of the suburbs" thing. Maybe it's "critical sympathy," maybe it's "sympathetic exasperation", maybe it's nodding-while-sighing . . . I'm not sure. The "porchers" can be smug and precious, and some of what they present as provocations seems pretty obvious (why yes, it would be good for communities if more of were involved in neighborhood organizations, etc.). Still, I agree that dense, walkable, mixed-use settlements are good things for human flourishing, I also was really influenced by Lasch, Rieff, and Schindler, and, yes, I think that Little Leagues are much preferable to "travel teams." (The proliferation of "travel teams" in youth baseball, at the expense of the traditional parks, is something that I think self-styled "true conservatives" need to complain about more, when they are complaining about Five Guys and rootlessness.)
Anyway . . . I thought Ross Douthat's recent piece, "When Place Is Not Enough", was well worth a read. Among other things, he develops the point that Americans' "rootlessness" is not simply a function of our mobility.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2013/05/when-place-is-not-enough.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
In our town, the purpose of travel baseball is to provide opportunities over the summer for it's best players to engage other exceptional baseball players. In our league, which is Cal Ripken-Babe Ruth, the Spring in-house league takes primacy over the travel team which only takes place over the summer. And in order to be on the travel team, a player must participant substantially in the in-house spring league or they cannot join the town's travel team. This is good because it helps foster true town citizenship that is associated with little league baseball. As such, travel and in-house baseball works in conjunction with each other, and not at cross purposes, at least in our town.
That said, travel baseball is a real conundrum, particularly if you have a son that can excel in it. The question becomes when is it too early an age to spend all of July playing travel ball? Personally, I think 9 is too young, but 13 might be too late. For a son whose human flourishing involves playing one of the greatest games ever invented, this is a difficult question.