I am worried. I may be overreacting, but two recent viral videos have caused me to wonder if we, as a society, have lost our minds. A few weeks ago, during the U.S. Open Tennis Championship, a player was signing autographs after a match, and of course it was covered not only by the official sports media but by everyone else in the tennis stadium who owned a cellphone.
The tennis player took his hat off and was obviously offering it to a young, 10 or 12-year-old boy. The boy looked stunned that the tennis player was doing something so gracious and kind. It did not last long, because an adult male swooped in, snatched the hat out of the boy’s hand and casually walked away with it.
Apparently, the hat snatcher is some kind of European super rich club member and double downed on his action with social media postings of his own, where he proclaimed absolutely no shame for taking the hat, even though he eluded to the fact — in his own postings — that the tennis player had intended the hat for the child.
There was the usual social media uproar but it, like all social media uproars, dwindled over time and eventually faded into the vapid cultural memory bank.
At first I wondered if the pervasiveness of our technology has magnified this boorish behavior beyond its real significance. There were no cellphones in 1927, so who knows, maybe some drunken lout elbowed a kid in the right field bleachers at Yankee Stadium and grabbed Babe Ruth’s 60th home-run ball that year.
Today, observing public uncivil behavior is a spectator sport, whether in supermarket checkout lines, on the freeway, or even in the pickup line at your local Catholic school. Everyone is in a hurry, and everyone is in a demanding mood these days.
That cultural incivility was on full display this month again on social media, when there was an incident at a professional baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Florida Marlins. A player on the Phillies hit a home run and it happened to land in a section packed with Phillies fans. A middle-aged woman tried to catch the ball. She failed. A middle-aged man scooped the ball off the stadium floor and whisked it away, where he immediately gave the ball to his elated 10-year-old son.
I have been attending Dodgers games since the days of Sandy Koufax, and I know the home run/foul ball in the stands protocol. If you catch the ball, the ball is yours. If you touch the ball and it goes to the floor, it belongs to anybody who scoops it up. I have seen grown men and women fly headfirst over seats at Dodger Stadium in pursuit of such souvenirs.
Well, the middle-aged woman either did not know the rules or chose to flagrantly disregard them. She accosted the father. Of course, all of this was captured at multiple angles with multiple cellphone cameras. The father was stunned at first, as this woman got in his face, demanding, as we now know, that because she had almost caught the ball, it was hers. It did not seem to matter whether there was a child involved. (If you watch the video often enough, you conclude there were two children involved.)
The father, who was initially obviously rattled at being accosted while he thought he was sharing a moment with his son, relented, gave the ball to the woman, and she went away happy like a 6-year-old who just got her ice cream cone after a tantrum.
The mistake I made watching this video was to lament the sorry state of our society. In reality, it is the sorry state of our broken nature. The first orb that we just had to have for our own was the apple Eve pushed the snake out of the way to get her hands on, soon followed by Adam, who did not want to miss out.
I can certainly imagine, among the throngs assembled on the banks of the Galilee, watching someone approach with a basket filled with only five small loaves of bread and two fish, and pushing an unsuspecting child out of the way to get his hands on that prize as well.
When more of these types of videos come, and rest assured, they will come, we would serve ourselves well if we saw them for what they truly are: reminders to all of us that we must always be aware of and keep in check our own inner demons. A quick Hail Mary on the part of the angry baseball grabber would have saved her a week’s worth of internet infamy.
