Second-Rate Kansas City Royals And Horrible Cowtown Deserved To Lose The World Series For Ignoring Gunned Down Black Girls
The dust has settled and now Kansas City sports fans are scurrying to salvage some semblance of dignity after a soul crushing World Series defeat at the hands of a far superior team and city.
In the last moments of the World Series, the cold, hard reality is that the San Francisco Giants, Pedro Sandoval and mostly Madison Bumgarner simply outclassed the Kansas City Royals. Now local sore losers are left to their endless litany of excuses and sports clichés about next season - A typical Kansas City lament. The reality is that Kansas City's playoff season winning was mostly a fluke and the result of an overall weak American League. Like most other political talking points in this cowtown, the success of the Royals was simply a product of media hype with very little substance. But what really stands out is how the murder of two innocent Black girls was pushed aside and diminished in local newscasts and throughout mainstream media coverage in the shadow of the World Series. Today, most Kansas City residents were far more disappointment by the loss of a mostly meaningless game than by the tragic loss of innocent life that persists in the urban core.
It's far too easy to blame racism for the disparity in local coverage, in fact, there is a profit motive to all of this local hype. Amid World Series hysteria mainstream media was committed to serving the best interests of their advertising partners rather than needs of the community. The game played into the disposable income of the quickly disappearing American middle-class whose vapid lifestyle is firmly committed to the frivolous. Sadly, in the end, and very much like all of the cheap Chinese goods which glut suburban box stores or the processed tripe put on American's table at every meal, the outcome was only disappointment.
Still, Kansas City seemed desperate to reconnect with a distant and (somewhat) glorious past as this town hoped for victory. Never mind that this abhorrently misguided nostalgia strives for a time that's impossible to recapture and really reflects nothing more than very real lack of confidence in the direction that Kansas City is taking into the future. Beneath the surface it's impossible to ignore that Kansas City, very much like the rest of the nation, is seemingly divided along sociopolitical and racial lines beyond all repair. The return to a glorious past as a step toward a victorious future was simply another cruel lie stunningly exposed when Alex Gordon stood incapacitated and seemingly frozen in time on 3rd base - Unable to make the mental or physical progress toward win a thanks to a manager, front office and city still in love with an overly idealized memory of far away former glory in years past.
In the final analysis the World Series of 2014 simply offered more proof that Kansas City and the nation are hopelessly fractured. Suburbanites and surrounding rural area sports enthusiasts were far too consumed with a celebration of their own arrogance to care about the struggles of an urban core community in mourning over the death of two innocent Black girls gunned down amid ongoing violence. Now that the Kansas City Royals have been soundly bested, nothing has really changed - the consumer class is still committed to a search for the next sensation while the urban core remains in a struggle for survival. More than anything, the World Series, the hype, marketing and all of the horrible renditions of "God Bless America" failed to provide any unifying myth for Kansas City but instead revealed a city and nation at the breaking point.