Working Class Love Notes #2: We Can Break Curses
Reflections on winning, losing, and The Chicago Cubs
"I hate being a Cubs fan, but I love being a Cubs fan even more.” – Harry Caray, sportscaster for Chicago Cubs 1981-1997
“I believe that we will win!” – organizing rally chant
Dear friends,
My beloved, powerful Kentucky People’s Union in small town Ashland, Kentucky ran our first local electoral campaign this year. And, despite running an incredible campaign knocking nearly 2,000 doors and engaging in hundreds of conversations with voters about our candidate, we didn’t make it through the primary. It was a hard loss.
Part of losing a campaign is reflecting on it, trying to make sense of it, so I wrote a love note, an essay for y'all, about it. I’m not going to sugarcoat or bright-side losing a campaign. It’s hard and there’s nothing about it that feels good. Material wins aren’t everything, but they do matter and we should try to win them. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of winning campaigns, but losing does come with organizing, and what I’m more interested in writing about in this essay is how we lose, how we define winning, and why we keep going. So, of course, as a non-sports watching person, I’m gonna use a sports metaphor to talk about winning and losing because what else?
We are the underdogs.
Like many working class people, my Dad was a sports fan. He was a committed Nascar fan, rooted for nearby teams like the Cincinnati Reds and Marshall college football, and of course as an Eastern Kentuckian, he was born a University of Kentucky basketball fan. But more than any of the other teams, I associate my Dad with being a Chicago Cubs fan.
In the mid 80s we got one of those giant satellite dishes that looked like a beige flying saucer that was perched up on the hill behind our farm house where it stayed long past its usefulness. With the satellite, we could get stations beyond the local Appalachian ones so we tuned into WGN-TV in Chicago and watched the Cubs. Throughout my life with Dad, there was the summer soundtrack of the Cubs playing in the background. Summer meant seeing the players walking onto the field looking sharp in their white, blue, and red uniforms and the sound of Harry Caray in the announcer’s seat at Wrigley Field giving wacky commentary, wearing his trademark black wide-rimmed glasses, the stadium organ holding out the opening chords as Caray led the home crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch. At the end of a home game, if we won, Steve Goodman’s song “Go Cubs Go” played as they flew the navy blue flag with the big white W waving in the wind, the Cubs’ win flag.
Generally being a Cubs fan meant losing. A lot. Legend has it that the Cubs were cursed, the Curse of the Billy Goat, marking one of the longest losing streaks in the history of Major League Baseball. The story goes that in 1945 a local tavern owner, a man named Billy Sianis, came to Wrigley Field with his pet goat Murphy. As you can imagine, the goat pissed people off, so Sianis was asked to leave. Enraged, he said “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more!” which has been interpreted that the Cubs would never win another National League Pennant for at least the rest of Sianis’s life. In total, the Cubs did not win a World Series for 108 years, long after Sianis and his goat were dead and gone, and 46 years after Sianis cast the curse. But still, faithful fans watched for decades.
Dad watched football, basketball, baseball, Nascar, and sometimes even golf on TV. At any time of day, sports might be on, and besides UK basketball, there was a lot of losing. Also, there weren't many clear teams he was consistently rooting for. It all bored me so much that I couldn’t fathom why he would watch sports if he wasn't rooting for any particular team, so one day I asked him about it.
“If none of your teams or favorite players are competing, why do you watch? Who do you root for?”
From his favorite seat in the house, his recliner in front of the TV, watching a random NFL game, he took a draw off his Camel Light and answered: “Whoever is picked to lose.”
I didn’t think too deeply about it at the time, but for whatever reason, it stuck with me, tucked away in my heart, a memory I wanted to come back to later when I needed it. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I think intuitively I knew it was deeper than the Cubs or any of these teams. It was also a way to say he was rooting for us. Not just our family, but every working class person in this country up against powers greater than us, picked to lose since birth, but still fighting.
Organizing for working class power is being an underdog, and no matter the setbacks, no matter the injustices that might feel like unbreakable curses, we keep going anyway.
Organizing is Learning to Win (and lose) Differently.
I’ve been organizing for eighteen years, all of those years in the South, and most of those years in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky. I have lost many times. Given that the ruling class and far right forces have used the South to carry out their agenda, rigging the rules in their favor for centuries, we’re up against a lot. Sometimes it’s big and brutal losses, sometimes small setbacks. Sometimes you win only to have it repealed later, but to be an organizer is to choose the side of the underdogs, to choose the side of those who are picked to lose and to keep trying anyway.
The Kentucky 2024 primary was on Tuesday May 21st. My team, our organizing group Kentucky People’s Union in Ashland, KY, ran our first city commission race. We endorsed one of our members and a local leader in his own right, Sean Farrington, who ran his campaign on a housing and homelessness platform, committing to push for a low barrier homeless shelter and a more transparent local government, one that works with and for working class Eastern Kentuckians, not landlords and the good ole boys. Sean was in a race with twelve other contenders for eight spots coming out of the primary to fill the four city commission seats. He was going in with no real name recognition, no significant campaign money, and he was a first time candidate. However, he had the largest ground campaign in the race.
Our campaign knocked 1,917 doors, made 2,648 calls, and had hundreds of conversations. On election day, 470 people in Ashland cast a vote for Sean. But at the end of the night, we were 100 votes short. The underdog, the candidate picked to lose, did lose the election that night. But it’s what happened before and after that loss that makes the difference.
At our election night party, after Sean gave us the news, everyone applauded him and thanked him for running, for representing us, and encouraged him to run again. Multiple members chimed in and assured him that KPU isn’t going anywhere, we will be there when he runs again, and we are committed to spending the summer following up with more than 400 people we talked to who agreed with our platform. Then, we spent the evening appreciating each other, acknowledging each person who played a leadership role on the campaign, celebrating every door knocked, every call made, every text sent, and every vote cast.
Organizing is about winning material changes. It matters. And it also matters how we define wins, how we learn to see them in new ways and set goals that aren’t just about the final vote count, but that are about meaningful conversations, actions taken, new leaders stepping up, seeing confidence and pride growing in people, and seeing the group stay together and grow even stronger after the loss, determined to make up the ground, so that next time, we get closer.
It’s very normal for a first-time candidate to lose their first election. Most first-time candidates run expecting to lose, but with the goal of getting their name out there and gaining experience. But not every candidate has a team of people who will keep knocking doors, keep hosting community potlucks, and keep pushing the city commissioners to pass a tenants’ bill of rights. Most candidates don’t have that kind of power coming out of a loss, but with KPU, Sean does.
We can break curses.
The billy goat curse lasted for 71 years, and altogether the Cubs did not win the World Series for 108 years. ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT YEARS. And yet, season after season, the fans showed up in the stands, tuned into the game from their radios or TVs, and the players took to the diamond and gave it their best shot, having some wins, having some losses, but never winning the World Series or a pennant championship. The Curse of the Billy Goat hung over their heads, but they kept playing and fans kept watching. Generations of Cubs fans over all those decades watched the game with their kids, and those kids grew up and watched with another generation, and so it went on, which is how my brother and I became Cubs fans along with Dad. And, after he died in 2011, we stayed fans.
In 2016, the Cubs were having a good year, and through a random turn of events, I ended up at Wrigley Field, the only time anyone in my family got to go to a game in Chicago. The Cubs won. The energy in the stadium was nothing short of magical, the energy of people who after a century, were on a winning streak and had some hope in their hearts. Singing “Go Cubs Go" and watching the W flag flying all around Chicago felt like I belonged to something special, and even though I hadn’t watched since Dad died, I was all in again. I kept watching from home when I could.
And then, a miracle happened. In 2016, the 46th anniversary of William Sianis's death, the curse was broken when the Cubs defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 5–0 in Game 6 of the 2016 National League Championship Series to win the National League pennant, and they kept going all the way to the World Series.
For the final game in the series, I went to a local brewery by myself so I could watch with a crowd, but there were too many Cleveland fans there, and all I really wanted to do was watch the World Series game with Dad, so I went back home. Since Dad wasn’t on the mortal plane anymore, I did the next best thing I could think of and I set out his urn and a photo of him beside the couch and he watched with me at home, along with my dog Sandy, where outside of his own recliner, he would’ve been happiest. Sometimes I talked to him about the game hoping that in some way he could hear me. As I’ve heard it said in Appalachia, I was as nervous as a nine tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I couldn’t sit still for the last inning so I stood on my couch holding Dad’s photo as I watched.
The game was so close, down to the wire, when Ben Zobrist hit a go-ahead double in the 10th inning, and the impossible happened. On the evening of Nov. 2nd The Cubs defeated the American League champion the Cleveland Indians 8–7 in 10 innings in Game 7 to win the World Series, 108 years after their last championship.
We learn to see time differently.
All I could do for hours, and well into the next day, was watch footage of fans celebrating, people crying, this working class Midwest city lighting up because one of their teams broke a curse and won the World Series after 108 years. Nothing was gonna steal that joy, a generational joy that had been building for more than a century.
But there was something else I wasn’t expecting. The stories I loved most about the victory were about the Cubs’ fans whose parents and grandparents never got to see a win while they were living, but their family members found a way to enjoy the game with them anyway. There were a number of people who listened to the game on a radio at a cemetery where their loved one was buried. Some, like me, kept their loved one’s urn and photos all around them as they celebrated. During the World Series, a makeshift memorial was erected outside Wrigley Field in honor of loved ones who never got to see the Cubs win a World Series. After the final game, fans from all over the country connected to their deceased loved ones, generations of fans who rooted for the Cubs for years without seeing a World Series win while they were alive, and we, the living, found our own way to let them know, to say to them: “We did it. The Cubbies finally did it.”
We keep taking a crack at the Empire.
As KPU friend and mentor Jerome Scott reminded us at a meeting the week before the primary election, we are in a marathon, not a sprint. In organizing we have to know that the time we are organizing in is just a stretch of a much longer race, a much longer story, and it all matters. The conversations we will have this summer with those 400 people in Eastern Kentucky who voted for Sean will add up so that maybe he wins the election in two years, but even beyond that, it all adds up so that one day in the future, we all win the general strike, we end the wars, and we are all free. No matter what, we keep going. Even up against what seems like an unbreakable curse, we keep taking a crack at the empire, chipping away at it, until it falls.
I hope one day after I’m gone, someone might think of me and how I loved my people, how I was on the side of the working class, the underdogs, and that I contributed in my small way to our big victory. When we hit the big one, I hope at the celebration, amidst all the hugging, singing, and dancing, that my people will think of me and say, “Beth, we did it.”
This article in Time Magazine by fellow Kentuckian Bobbi Conn on The Demonization of Rural America. “If we can find the courage to set aside classist prejudice, we might discover that there are no throwaway places and more importantly, no throwaway people. Not even hillbillies like me.”
In the Kentucky Democratic Primary, 18% of voters cast their ballot for “Uncommitted”, many of those a protest against the genocide in Palestine, something that most people in this country would never believe Kentuckians would do. This great Commonwealth is sending eight uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention. We are underdogs in the South in solidarity with underdogs across the world, fighting together for the world we deserve.
The day following the primary election, the Protect our Schools KY campaign launched out of an elementary school in Hazard, Kentucky. Teachers, faith leaders, students, grassroots groups, and every day working class people across Kentucky are launching a fight to defend our public schools from a constitutional amendment that would allow public school funding to be funneled to unaccountable private schools. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!
Kentuckian Tyler Childers singing “Lady May” with Kermit the Frog Oh, my heart.