I have this oft revisited memory from childhood. I was at a Sea Dogs game at Hadlock field with my family. Dark had fallen and the flood lights were on, and my big brother was pointing out the bats that were flying over head. There was a boy in a white baseball cap next to us sitting with his dad. “Those aren’t bats,” he said. “Those are seagulls.”
I remember being livid that the boy didn’t know he was wrong. I was also baffled—why didn’t he know that they were bats? I think this memory comes up for me lately because as I watch fascism unfold around me, I know that the animals above our heads at the baseball game that night were bats. All the information tells me that those were—quite predictably—bats. And yet, that boy was so self assured, and indignantly so, as to seem egotistically wounded by my brother’s observations. As I watch Americans react to the authoritarian actions taken by the Trump administration I find myself feeling similarly livid and baffled, not to mention heart broken. Can’t you see that they are bats?
