You Don't Sound Like You're From Around Here, Boy!

Ozzie Guillen is in trouble. Again. The first-year manager of the renamed Miami Marlins gave an interview. After all the tumult during Ozzie's tenure with the Chicago White Sox, maybe, we think, he should have learned not to give interviews. But Ozzie likes to talk, and he's a man who says what he thinks, with very little internal editing getting in the way.
Time magazine asked the Venezuelan native about Fidel Castro. Among other things, Ozzie said that Castro deserves respect "because that (expletive) has been in power so long." There are things you can't say in this world. Bobby Petrino would tell you that if you are the football coach at the University of Arkansas and you have a motorcycle wreck, you can't say you were by yourself if your 25 year old mistress was with you, or you'll be the ex-football coach at Arkansas. If Ozzie managed in Seattle, or had come from New Hampshire, he wouldn't have been asked about Cuba. But he works in Miami, and came from Venezuela, and now he is suspended for five games, while Miami's mayor seems to have nothing more significant to attend to than to call for Guillen's firing.
It doesn't seem to matter that many Venezuelans, chief among them, President Hugo Chavez, have a very different relationship with Castro and Cuba than the Little Havanans do. Chavez has gotten treatment for his recurring cancer in Castro's medical community, and sold his oil there. Venezuelans don't teach their children that all evil in the hemisphere emanates from Havana. So, like places in the world where children are taught that the US, or Israel, or both, are responsible for all the world's ills, and people are then willing to train as suicide bombers, we are left dealing with ways of looking at the world that don't make any sense to us. And in our day and time, what is different is wrong, and what's wrong needs to be wiped out.
Ozzie didn't blow anything up, except perhaps his career. But we see again that whether it's Moslem v. Christian, Jew v. Moslem, Cuban ex-pat v. Castro, or anyone who doesn't think like I do v. me, human beings don't deal very well with others' world-views when they are different.
Even when you're talking about a major league manager's perceptions of international relations!
It ultimately doesn't matter who manages the Marlins for the rest of the season. But until we can all reclaim a little empathy, just occasionally see the world through someone else's eyes, and build the bridges that necessarily follow, we will all keep looking for heads to be served up on plates. And we're running out of plates.