When Parker Byrd lost a leg to amputation after a boating accident during the summer of 2022, the idea that his dreams of playing college baseball would ever manifest seemed ludicrous; but shortly after the accident, Byrd said this:
‘Just because I lost a leg, doesn’t mean I’ve lost hope, or I’ve lost my heart… So I’m just gonna try to do everything that I can just to get back onto the field.’
And, after 23 surgeries, two years of grueling physical therapy, and with a prosthetic leg, Byrd defied the odds and made his athletic debut this past weekend. Here’s the story from an article by Trey Wallace at OutKick:
A true story of heart and determination played out on the baseball field for East Carolina on Friday night, with Parker Byrd making his first ever collegiate start. But this was more than just any debut, as Byrd became the first ever player in Division 1 history to compete with a prosthetic leg.
Not only did he compete at the college level with a serious handicap, he competed at the D1 level—but how did he do it? I mean, he’s missing half of a leg that’s been replaced by a prosthetic.
By all accounts Byrd is certainly a victim of somebody else’s errors—he was run over by a boat and severely injured by the propeller—but neither he nor anyone else played to any sense of victimhood. He didn’t wallow in self-pity, and he didn’t root his entire identity in being a person who was owed something after experiencing very unfortunate circumstances; he set the bar extremely high, worked incredibly hard, and made history.
For the past year or so, my 12-year-old son has been very into soccer, and like all the other soccer boys his age he’s slightly obsessed with Argentinian player Lionel Messi, which is the only reason why I know this—Messi has a rare disease, one he was diagnosed with as a child which severely stunted his growth. Messi is only five-foot-seven, a serious disadvantage when competing against other men who are much taller.
If the people in Byrd’s life, or Messi’s, had repeatedly told them that because of those circumstances out of their control they would never make it as competitive athletes, well they wouldn’t have. Playing to a person’s sense of victimhood, or conditioning them to see themselves as victims, is condemning them to a life of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment, and nowhere is this more obvious than the Democrat left’s approach to minority demographics.
The Democrats labeled voter I.D. laws as “racist” and one can only infer that’s because they think blacks and browns are too stupid to obtain legal identification.
The Democrats say academic standards are too high and exclusionary to the blacks and browns because of institutionalized white racism—so the bar is lowered and lowered until blacks and browns are dumbed down and doomed to a low-income and impoverished life, while white kids held to higher standards are given a substantial edge to achieve financial security and stability.
The Democrats assert that because blacks were once a largely enslaved population in America, they’re owed trillions of dollars, and “free” money and services—but endless government handouts always beget the worst kind of slavery.
The Democrats told us that black and brown women have borne the brunt of sexual violence, a wrong only rectified by “sexual liberation” or the wholesale slaughter of their own flesh and blood—abortion mills are largely located in minority neighborhoods—meanwhile, whites are given a much better chance of being born into an environment in which little ones thrive (a monogamous nuclear family).
As Wallace also reported, Byrd described his collegiate debut as a “blessing”:
‘Definitely grateful for the opportunity. Don’t take each day for granted,’ Parker Byrd mentioned. ‘I know that it is a blessing to be back out here. Definitely a different feeling being out here. But I’m just blessed to be here.’
Amen.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.