Point of View: Godspeed

Several outstanding young athletes have decamped recently, preventing me from recounting in florid language their triumphs every week, but Godspeed, I say, for, as has been shown in the past, mileage generally must be logged if great athletic ambitions are to be realized by East Enders.

So, goodbye, Chasen Dubs, Kevin Fee, and Charles Manning. East Hampton’s and Bridgehampton’s high school teams are obviously the poorer for your having departed, but no one can argue with your desire to enlarge your purview, and by so doing improve your games.

(And, wonderful to tell, these leave-takings may inspire those left behind to step up their games!)

I read in the paper the other day about someone who said that everyone’s ambitions (life-affirming ones, of course) ought to be given free rein, and that it was a shame if they weren’t, and I agree. Why else are we here if not to cheer one another on in fruitful endeavors?

Yet obscene amounts of money continue to be diverted from the generative work in which society ought to be engaged to atomic arsenals, prisons, walls, and things, whether injected or ingested (as in ideological bile), that stifle the spirit.

I have in mind when it comes to walls not only the needless 2,000-mile one proposed for our border with Mexico, needless because the immigration wave has receded, but also those of gated communities.

Aren’t many of us descended from families on the run? Illegals, if you will, who declared ourselves free and legal after curtailing, in a manner of speaking, the freedom of those whom we found here, and, later, those who were brought here to do our bidding.

Perhaps we have been evolving . . . perhaps, though there are many reasons to think that for all our grand talk we are not. As for making America great again, I would like to think we’re being enjoined to reawaken its purported spirit of fairness, its greatness of spirit — something that, frankly, I thought was dealt a mortal blow in 1968.

And, of course, you don’t regenerate greatness of spirit by building walls, by saber-rattling, or by stoking irrational fears of the other. You do what you can to ameliorate the exigencies of life, to let talent flourish, and to praise it when it does.

So, in that spirit I say, Godspeed Chasen, Kevin, and Charles!