Peterson: A pitch for healthier politics

You think printing and distributing a daily newspaper 365 days a year is hard? Try running a co-ed softball team.

After years of managing our rag-tag lineup in Mountain Recreation’s summer league in Eagle, our longtime distribution manager David Hakes gracefully retired from the role before the start of this season.

Just like wrangling enough folks to distribute papers every morning, getting a full lineup each Wednesday night during the summer is an ongoing juggling act. David is a Hall of Famer at both jobs.

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To keep the team going, I agreed to take on a player-manager role this year. Man, what a sucker.

While we’ve got our regulars, each week, without fail, I would have to fire off a few urgent texts to see if someone could show up so we could fill out a lineup card. A couple of times, we picked up floaters from other teams who joined our dugout for the night.

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Somehow, we managed to win our first five games, before dropping five straight. Our midsummer swoon was driven, in part, by the regular stuff that gums up a softball season: vacations, kids, concerts and work. And that’s not even mentioning injuries. Our star shortstop missed a few games with a case of plantar fasciitis while our best female outfielder missed a game due to a serious thumb injury sustained cutting cheese.

Win or lose, though, we battle every week and we never get too high or low. And after each game, there’s always time to have a beer or two and BS — preferably with the opposing team — whether we’re savoring a big win or trying to dull the sting of a 10-run drubbing.

Our team couldn’t be weirder if we tried. We’re a band of softball misfits, an assortment of current Vail Daily employees, ex-employees, a spouse of an employee, and friends and acquaintances, including folks we first met at the ballfield.

We come from points across the valley, with an age range that spans a good 40 years from the youngest to oldest on our lineup. The one thing we all have in common is a love for getting out and playing. And if there’s a standing team rule, it’s that we never take ourselves too seriously. Case in point: We chant “Beer! Beer!” when one of our batters has two strikes in the count in hopes that they’ll strike out and be forced to fill the cooler for the next game.

The same vibe goes for the rest of the league. There’s great competition, but there’s even better sportsmanship. We might argue calls, and there’s the occasional chirping, but for the most part, everyone gets along and keeps it classy. The handshake line after each game is always joyful.

There’s a lesson there, and maybe it’s this: Sometimes it takes us acting like kids to relearn how to be adults.

Playing softball, under the lights, it’s hard to be too angry about the current state of the world — or, for that matter, hate someone on the opposite team.

I’m sure if we really thought about it, there are plenty of things we could argue about if we had happened to meet somewhere else other than the softball diamond — like the comments section on Facebook.

The truth is that it’s really hard to hate someone once you get to know them. And when I say know someone, I mean up close and in person and preferably “offline.”

Like a lot of folks, I too often can’t look away from the nonstop arguments that take place on Eagle County Classifieds, on Instagram or X, or even under some of the posts on the Vail Daily’s Facebook page. Rarely a day goes by where someone doesn’t call or email to accuse me of being personally responsible for the decline of Western civilization for a story that ran in the Vail Daily or a political cartoon or column that appeared on our pages.

Which often makes me wonder: How did we get here? How did our political views get so hardened? How did our country and our world get so divided, so rancorous? Why are we so quick to label people? Why do we fail to see the complexity of one another and instead simplify each other into those who are with us and those we think are against us?

These aren’t our factory settings, and these “smart” devices and social media platforms that clamor for our constant attention are only widening that divide. There’s also something to be said about unhealthy media diets and the nonstop news cycle. 

That’s why, as a news organization whose motto is “Bringing Communities Together,” we’ve partnered with Rocky Mountain PBS to present three community events this week that are designed to foster community dialogue and show that, despite our differences, the American experiment, just like the game we’ve played for generations, is still alive and well.

The Vail Daily is proud to present “Undivide Us” screenings on Tuesday, Aug. 27, at Colorado Mountain College in Edwards and Thursday, Aug. 29, at the Gypsum Recreation Center followed by community discussions. There will also be an Above the Noise event with Spanish language speakers on Wednesday, Aug. 28, at the Gypsum Recreation Center.

“Undivide Us” is a film that challenges the idea that citizens who disagree are not capable of civil conversation. If you’re interested in joining us, you can still sign up for these events. I haven’t seen the film myself, but I’m hopeful that these screenings — and the conversations that ensue — will bring us closer as a community ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5.

I promise you we can find common ground if we just try. But to do so, we’ve got to work at listening to one another and respecting one another. We may not be able to change one another’s political views, but we can certainly change the way we talk to each other.

In the end, we can shake hands or dap it up like we do in the handshake line after the game and agree that, win or lose, we’re all in this together.

Nate Peterson is the editor of the Vail Daily.