After a week of mostly peaceful protests over Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of the Baltimore P.D. degenerated into violence — some of it occurring close to Camden Yards — the Orioles opted to postpone tonight’s contest against the White Sox citing safety concerns. Beforehand, however, club COO John Angelos displayed a sophisticated-by-MLB standards perspective on the unrest (“inconvenience at a ballgame (is) irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans”) in a series of tweets compiled by For The Win’s Ted Berg :
My greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.
The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importances of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights.