For a professional athlete, taking any sort of political stand — no matter how human and generous and reasonable and decent — can lead to all sorts of headaches. Fans and media with different viewpoints will sometimes vilify a player for demonstrating any opinions beyond those pertaining to his sport, and others will wait for the player to struggle, then call into sports-talk radio to share brilliance along the lines of, “Maybe instead of eradicating polio he should have been studying the Panthers’ defense!”
It might be unfortunate, but it is nonetheless the case. And it takes a bold and brave sort of sports power couple to rise above that nonsense and do something good for some fellow people when those people have, for reasons directly antithetical to the tenets upon which the United States of America was founded, become the inadvertent subjects of blustery political grandstanding.
A’s closer Sean Doolittle and his girlfriend, Comcast SportsNet Bay Area host and writer Eireann Dolan, welcomed 17 Syrian refugee families for a Thanksgiving feast in Chicago on Wednesday night. From Dolan’s Instagram:
On her blog, Thank You Based Ball, Dolan writes:
There are 12 million people, half of whom are children, who have fled their homes in Syria escaping ISIS and civil war. Before ISIS, many faced mass executions of near-genocidal proportions under the Assad regime in Syria. Many others escaped a life of religious persecution. But they were all desperate enough to have to leave their home with no promise of another home….
We see on the news that we should fear these refugees, half of whom are children. That there’s a chance they could “radicalize” once they get here. I in no way want to even lend credence to this fear, but wouldn’t you say that the single best way to prevent radicalization is through one-on-one ambassadorship?
Like it or not, you are an ambassador for this country. Everything you do has the propensity to be perceived as our culture to those who are new here. Don’t waste your ambassadorship. Our culture is our greatest asset.
The whole post is well worth reading.
In April, Doolittle and Dolan bought up tickets to the A’s LGBT Night to donate to a local center for LGBTQ youth. Dolan’s Instagram profile links to a GoFundMe page raising funds for the Syrian Community Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Syrian refugee families in their transition to life in the Chicago area.
