You gotta be kiddin’

Four baseball fields are being proposed for $21.5 million and Saipan Mayor Donald G. Flores believes this may be realized through federal assistance. Twenty-one million bucks of “other people’s money,” mainly U.S. federal grants, for a friggin’ baseball field. You gotta be kiddin’ me, dude. Your morals and ethics have been totally twisted, Mr. Mayor, if you’re looking for free handouts to make baseball fields for Koreans and Japanese to hit a ball on while your kids are high on ice and your education system is struggling to meet the needs of a new high tech world.

What kind of people have you become? Your roads are rotting, your hospital is being driven into the ground and major Medicaid cuts will force even more problems on the sick, your coral reefs are rotting and bleaching with rapidly declining fish stocks, and your community has a massive drug problem, even your local political leaders are selling ice! What a moral disgrace for a small community.

You live on a tiny, isolated rock 5 miles by 10 miles in size and you have almost insurmountable economic problems to solve ASAP before Saipan becomes a ghost town financially and socially and your mayor is whimpering for “somebody, help us poor islanders get some free candy from Big Brother. Help me get a free handout.” Where is your pride, CNMI? Your beat your chests about “Chamorro pride”..well, here it is…a whining, no self-respecting plea for free money to make baseball fields that Koreans can play in.

Oops, I forgot. The real reason the CNMI leadership wants that baseball field is that it means another backend cousin-to-cousin “locals-only land deal” where they can suck the U.S. federal government’s tit and scam some money. That’s the real deal and we all know it. It’s not about developing a new island revenue stream from professional baseball in Asia. The yahoos up on Capital Hill wouldn’t have a clue how to do any form of pro-sports business, and we all know the fields will end up looking like a Koblerville jungle dump, all overgrown with beer cans on the lawn in three years. And empty of pro baseball teams. That’s the real plan the mayor and his cronies are envisioning. Rome is burning, and your talking baseball fields?

Chris West
Santa Monica, Calif.