What is this Unity?

What is a unit? It seems a fundamental enough place to start if we are going to answer that question in the title of this post, 'what is Unity?'

We can find a great variety of examples, from very simple ('a dollar is the value in goods or services that a merchant will accept in exchange for one American 'dollar bill' note') to smplifying complex notions into a metric (an inch is the length of the last bone of the distal phalanx of a...moderately influential sovereign who ruled by dint of an arbitrary methodology; one centimeter...was, originally, one billionth-part of the distance from the equator to a pole of planet Earth in the Sol system, now it is measured as a fraction of light-speed).

Other units are even more complex. Take, for example, 'The' definitive 'Big Unit,' Randy Johnson, the baseball pitcher who might easily have been given the moniker for his tall and lean silhouette, which, atop a pitching mound with a ballcap could easily be caricaturized as a numeral 1. He was, after all, the tallest player to-date in MLB history through most of his career.

He might have earned the name for being one of the first pitchers in league history to consistently throw 100 miles-per-hour. It might have something obscure to do with his high strikeout rate, low earn-run average and elite rate of hitting opposition batmen with his throws. But the reality is that he simply bowled over a teammate once, early in his career and the veteran exclaimed that Johnson, a rookie, was "a big unit!" and the name stuck, likely because it was reinforced by other observations of his image or nature.

He was not, regardless of the simplicity of the nickname, a simple machine. With a four-pitch arsenal and a slider that 'tunneled' or 'channeled' exactly like his fastball, ending with a wicked late-hook, and thrown at the speed other pitchers threw their fastballs, 90 mph, the slider might look like a fastball coming at your head, then end in the strike zone, or might look like a juicy high fastball, a home-run pitch, and end in the dirt across the plate, or near your back toe. He was, furthermore, lanky, awkwardly constructed, like a blonde Abe Lincoln, though I recall my mother thinking he was comely of face.

I'm belaboring again, but the point is that unity, clearly, is not sameness. The brilliance of a unit built to deliver a round object of moderate weight to a receiver, past an intermediary with a cudgel attempting to intervene is not in his sameness (he had an oddness of character that was occasionally noted, as well), and not in the fact that all of his parts moved in the same direction at the same time. He was a unit because he was a complete package, and perhaps also because he came with none of the decorative excess that would have made him more than a unit.

The point is, coordination, full stop. We'll stay away from the purpose of the coordination, as we're not delivering round objects on a consistent basis every five to six days for nine months out of the year.

I've found myself telling many members of the so-called moderate...portion of the Democratic Party--that is, those, on Twitter, who purport to be of the ideologies that vote consistently for Democratic candidates because the Democratic Party is, today, identified with these Progressive and/or Liberal ideals, but on a more moderate and pragmatic basis. I've found myself, as I say, telling-off more than one so-called moderate, and more than one Black person who attempted to manipulate 'tribalist' and 'identity politics' methods to build sympathy. Some of these tactics were exclusivist, some elitist (Black elitist, but elitist), and some were simply dismissive.

I have found myself, in some cases, being intentionally insulting to some of these people in response to their tones, but I also notice that I am most animated by activity I see as intramural. As noted, I do not expect every part of the Big Unit to move in the same direction at the same time, some of the parts are much too far away from one another to achieve universal grace. But if you're punching yourself in the balls every time you follow through with a pitch, I don't care how fast it gets there, I can guarantee that you're doing it wrong.

And yet, circling back, finally, to the thought I teased in my last post, I realize that it is an unfamiliar and disorienting feeling to be made to feel a bit out of place in one's own home nd country. I realize it because it is what I experience, half-Jewish my by father's side; bar mitzvahed at thirteen, then belatedly ceremonially converted at seventeen (because Judaisim comes from the mother's faith); failed in a college exam at eighteen for not being firm enough in my religious practice to plan my yom kippur fast in advance; and eventually converted to Greek paganism, a faith I am at liberty to practice without the accountability of peers.

That sense that we all sometime get nowadays, of feeling like a foreigner in your own country, that is a feeling I experience every time a Christian person tells me how 'blessed' they feel. Or that somehow the 'glory' is credible to their god. Or any one of a th0usand other ways, like when I go looking for obnoxiously Christian things sports interviewees say and end up with a whole list of google results that guarantees my online advertising with be absolutely insufferable for an indeterminate period.

I'm not trying to make the reader feel guilty, because I recognize that we literally all feel that way sometimes these days. That's what I'm writing about here. Its what someone means when they shout 'White America is dying!' into a bullhorn on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California at a bunch of colored kids.

Is it so much to ask, that we meter our vitriol for disparate circles of in-grouping? I mean for all of the sakes of all of the gods of good and righteousness throughout, for Yaweh and for Jehova, for Allah and Jesus, Athena and Mary, for Apollo and Zeus and Demeter and Vishnu, for all of them, what kind of animals are we? Were we all simply raised by our televisions after all? Because I surely do not see the influence of loving mothers, Jewish or otherwise.

I can't tell you how to react, the next time someone makes you feel wrong or somehow out-of-place. I'd suggest it should start from the question of "Am I, in fact, wrong?" and a flow-chart can be made from there, but the reality is that "Am I, in fact, wrong?" should not be question that requires a triggering moment in your life. Ask yourself, now. Am I, in fact, in the wrong?

Ask again. And again and again and again and so forth. Because the truth is always "somehow, probably" or scaling worse from there. No one wants to be scared and angry.

I don't know. This feels like the place where your priest or your rabbi would tell you how to approach the angry person in your life, but I ran away from preachers and their captive communities two decades ago. I guess I'll just say, remember yourself. Remember who you are and who raised you. Remember who you want to be. Who you want us to be. Act, don't act, accordions, I can't tell you what to do.

Cheers, be well, keep it one.