Grace and Magnanimity

Sunday was a day of great delight.  I had the honor of spending it with some of my childhood heroes, old men who were younger men back in the 1950s and 1960s.

I grew up hanging around a dirt race track in my hometown.  Saturday nights were race nights, and I happily walked the four miles from home to the track, than back again after the races were finished.  I was a pit rat -  a young kid who would gofer things for any team that'd need a volunteer.  Later on, I'd get to wrench a little bit here and there - change a tire, tighten this, help adjust that, put the jack under the car, and so on.

The the young men who raced back then are now old men.  Most are in their eighties and nineties.  My old racetrack is long gone, having been sold to a company that builds big-box stores.  But another racetrack, some 30 miles distant, still operates and last night was set aside to honor the old timers.

I went, and got to rub some old elbows and touch a few old race cars.

Miles Melius is now in his nineties.  He once won every race he entered, for an entire season.  He's still an interesting guy, and listening to him banter with other old drivers he raced against was a lot of fun.  Happy, polite, respectful guys.  Miles somehow crawled through the window of his old, now lovingly restored, race car and rolled a few slow laps.

The old race cars are long gone, replaced by newer, faster, and far more expensive cars. Here's a photo of the field taken during the pace lap before the main feature race.

The pace car in front is owned by Billy Schwister, another old racer.  He took his old race car and modified it to be street legal, hence the headlights, tail lights, horn, etc.  And the doors open so he can more easily get into it.  He drives it around town when the weather is nice.

The feature was awesome!  60 laps of hard, fast, intense racing.  The final 15 laps were a two-car battle for first place.  There was passing, re-passing, banging, bumping, rubbing, sliding, and pushing all around the track.  The fans were standing on the bleachers, cheering, yelling, and clapping.  The winner made a great final pass in the last turn before the finish line.  The crowd went wild!

The first and second place drivers parked their cars at the start/finish line, got out, and congratulated each other.  They praised each other in post-race interviews.  They complimented each other, they shook hands, they slapped each other on the back.  The winner was gracious and humble in victory, the second place finisher was magnanimous in defeat.

We like it when competitors do that, whether in a race, or the Super Bowl, or the World Series, or our kids' fourth grade soccer team.  Grace and magnanimity.  It's how we raised our kids, most of us.  Its how we behave, if we were raised right.

I glanced at my cell phone a few times yesterday while I was at the track, mostly to keep track of the 450+ comments on the post about same sex marriage and religion.  Parts of it were interesting, other parts were (and are) simply vile.

What happened to adults being gracious and magnanimous?

Couldn't the winners have simply said something like "Our team won a court decision Friday making same sex marriage legal in Wisconsin, and we're really happy about that.  We respect that others may not feel the same way, but it was a victory for us.  In a diverse society there a a wide range of beliefs, and we respect that others may not view this as a victory the way we do"?  That would have been a gracious thing to say.

Winning a court decision and then launching into a tirade, on Lem's blog and elsewhere, against the 78 million Catholics in America was simply low class, petty, vile and vindictive.  It was neither gracious nor magnanimous.  Adults should be better than that.