View original artwork here.

There is a great vignette in the book Moneyball, illustrating the gulf between what actually happens on a baseball field and what the statistics reflect. Imagine the following situation…

Two outs. Runner on third. The pitcher throws his best pitch, fools the batter who hits a lazy fly ball towards right-center field. But the right fielder is a guy like Albert Belle — all bat, no range, no glove. The Belle-ish outfielder can’t get there and the lazy fly ball drops in for a clean single and the runner scores from third.

It’s an affecting story. Matthew Desmond, writing in the New York Times Magazine, profiles Vanessa Solivan, a poor single mother raising three children. Vanessa works as a home health aide, yet she and her three teen children are often reduced to sleeping in her car, a 2004 Chrysler Pacifica. In the morning, she takes her two daughters and one son to her mother’s house to wash and get ready for school. Vanessa has diabetes. Her work brings in between $10 and $14 per hour depending upon the health coverage of the mostly elderly patients she cares for. But because of her responsibilities to her children, Vanessa works only 20 to 30 hours per week. That doesn’t provide enough to keep this family of four above the poverty line.

Yes, Vanessa gets government benefits. Between the Earned Income Tax Credit and child credits, she received $5000 from Uncle Sam last year. She also gets SNAP (food stamps), but when one of her daughters qualified for SSI last year due to a disability and began receiving $766 per month, the family’s SNAP assistance was reduced from $544 to $234 per month.

I struggle to write about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It is such a monumental moment that I fear my feeble attempt to describe it would be like trying to replicate the Sistine Chapel with crayons in a spiral notebook. But like most Americans alive that day, I remember vividly where I was and how my chest tightened when I realized the enormity of what I was witnessing. That feeling returns on the occasions when I read and hear about the lives lost in the fight to protect this nation from its enemies. Each story is a model of selfless sacrifice for the freedom of our fellow Americans.

We learn about our war heroes in school: ordinary men and women who join a fight for the existence of a nation that affords a blanket of security and the opportunity to wake up each morning with a new day of freedom. They were farmers and militiamen who came together to defeat a great British army; they were young men sent overseas to fight tyranny and the worst evils in Europe and later the fight against Communism. More recently young men and women are in the heat of the desert, fighting a war that someone born 17 years ago today could join without ever not knowing our nation at war. These patriots, along with the our police, firefighters, and emergency responders put aside their safety so we can be safe going about our day-to-day lives.