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What do we owe to each other? Sometimes, we're helpless to change the big, bad things of the world, but when we take as much from a place as baseball fans have taken from Venezuela, part of what we owe in return is our attention and our effort.
There is an unfortunate tendency, in the United States, to think about much of the rest of the world as less cultured or civilized. That assumption is racist and xenophobic, and it's also objectively wrong. To wit: don't assume, merely because nothing material is being done about it, that there's massive ambiguity or confusion about what happened in Venezuela's recent national elections. On Jul. 28, millions of voters went to the polls in that nation, and its robust computerized voting tabulation system yielded reasonably clear results. President Nicolas Maduro lost, according to the best data that has made it out into the international public sphere, by a wide margin. Opposition challenger Edmundo González Urrutia won, and should be president right now.
Instead, Gonzalez and his party are under a new investigation, instigated by Maduro's top prosecutor. The government has upended the will of the Venezuelan people and declared Maduro the winner, wielding fake or manipulated election results as a cudgel. Mass protests are underway, but the government is powerful and ruthless, and the international community (whether stretched too thin by the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, or unwilling to engage in any infringement on national sovereignty, even in what seems like an egregious breach of that privilege) has not mustered any meaningful intervention.
At what must be the most difficult moment of his young life, Cubs reliever Adbert Alzolay is speaking up. In a series of tweets over the last several days, he's drawing attention back to this issue over and over, even as he braces for career-threatening Tommy John surgery.
Please notice that the above is in English. Alzolay tweeted and retweeted multiple things about the election and the ensuing unrest in the days before that post, but on Monday, he turned his message toward his English-speaking followers. Nor was it only that one post.
We know, of course, that athletes are not politicians, and that many of them carry deeply confused or flawed political opinions. Like the rest of us, they are prone to statements that might be too strong, or self-interested. What Alzolay is trying to tell his (predominantly) American followers, though, is worth hearing and passing on, not as an endorsement of González or of any particular political ideology, but because it boils down to a simple truth: wrong was done here. This isn't right, and attention needs to be paid. The wrong won't be righted unless and until the world tunes in.
The Carter Center issued a strong statement about the elections, back on Jul. 30. Do not, under any circumstances, take Alzolay's word for what happened, but do know that the international diplomatic and human rights advocacy community backs him up on it.
We can not change the outcome of the Venezuelan elections. Paradoxically, though, it is our duty as baseball fans to try. It is our duty, as fans of Alzolay and Willson Contreras, of Luis Arráez and Ronald Acuña Jr., of Johan Santana and Dave Concepcion, to repay what we have gotten from Venezuela, by caring about the people who still live there (or who are fleeing, sometimes for their lives) in the same way we have chosen to care about the few who have come into our lives through this channel of entertainment. Call or email your Congressional representative. Talk to others about this developing crisis. And keep listening, to Alzolay and others who speak up about it.
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