Dear Kansas City
Dear Kansas City,
I’m going to skip the pleasantries because we know each other better than that. You’re the heart of America, and you treat anyone who comes like family. Not many tourists visit Kansas City, but maybe that’s because everyone’s welcome, everyone feels at home, and there aren’t visitors or outsiders. As a Spanish friend said about you “La ciudad es un pueblo grande.” The city is a big village.
First off, can you let someone else win the Super Bowl? I mean, goodness. You’ve got a World Series, 3 Super Bowls, and 4 major soccer trophies since 2010. You’re supposed to be small-market, aren’t you? You realize New York has 2 championships in that span, right?
Alright, fine. Win a couple more. The Chiefs have been down at halftime of every Super Bowl they’ve won, Sporting can’t win a trophy without going to penalties, and Hosmer stealing home was amazing. When you win, it’s fun to watch. We’ll allow it. Win more.
The real reason I’m writing is because I love you. You’re a two-state miracle town, a City of Fountains with more boulevards than Paris. You came of age fighting your own Civil War in Bleeding Kansas before the rest of it even started back east. You found a way to survive and grow up as life shifted on the plains from stockyards to wheat to … what do you do now? Health Information Technology? Greeting Cards? You’ve got bankers and architects? Web designers? Patrick Mahomes?
That’s why it hurts so much to see the news. Even in this beautiful place, the Heart of America where everyone’s invited to come in for barbecue, you’re grieving tonight like Las Vegas, Buffalo, Orlando, Blacksburg, El Paso, Uvalde, Newtown before you. It’s just not fair.
You’ll grieve the losses that are your own. Because there are no outsiders.
There are people everywhere trying to help, change things, be a shoulder to cry on and carry each other. In a place where the seasons are that harsh, depending on each other is just what you do. It’s how you’ve always done it. It’s how you always will. It’s how a never-left-the-state Tennessean like me became a Kansas Citian faster than you can say ‘HI, MAY I HELP YOU.”
Show us how it’s done. A week ago, the eyes of the world were on Kansas City because of a pop star and a football player. Maybe now we’ll see what it looks like when a place grieves its own, rallies, hopes for a better future, and love seeps from the community into its wounds and sorrows.
This will be a poor analogy, but it’s the best I’ve got right now: When the Super Bowl was a one-score game in the 4th quarter, because of who you had on your team, we all knew what would happen, the Chiefs would win whether we liked it or not. Maybe it’s the same now: we know who you’ve got and what you will do. And you’re going to make us all so proud.
Heart of America, I sure hope so.
-Sam