Colin Kaepernick and other athletes have received unmitigated grief from the late Bob McNair to none other than The Donald about protesting police brutality during the national anthem at their games.  Up until a few days ago, league owners and commissioners have responded to such protests with everything from benign neglect to outright hostility.  Fox Noise and their ilk have vilified protesting athletes by lying that they’re “disrespecting the flag” and other false equivalencies.  Now it’s all stirred up again after the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd where the nation’s conscience was truly moved to actually doing something about systemic racism that is pervasive and especially manifest through the violence visited upon ethic groups, especially African Americans.  States are finally removing Confederate monuments that were erected decades after the Civil War; policing policies are being changed all over the country.  Colin Kaepernick is actually in discussion with the Seattle Seahawks after 4 years of being exiled from the NFL for daring to protest actual and deadly police brutality.

And here we go again.  As the big athletic leagues finally retreat from their white supremacist stance in the name of unity, all the right-wingers on social media are most indignant about “disrespecting the flag” and other such drivel.  This is one of those subjects where everyone gets offended.  Right-wingers get pissed about people not standing at attention with hand over heart for the Star Spangled Banner, but then get oddly just as indignant when not allowed to wave the main flag of treason against the US, the Confederate battle flag.  I’m like, make up your fucking mind.  Do you support the US or treason? You can’t do both.

So, here’s my idea – Let’s just go back to the way it used to be…let’s just play ball and leave the jingoism at home.  No national anthem, no marching soldiers, no football-field-sized American flags, no cynical teary eyed reunions with Dad just home from active duty posing as the catcher for little Johnny to discover after the first pitch.  We can leave all the fighter jets in their hangars while their pilots can spend their weekends with family instead of smoke trailing flyovers over 100,000 drunk rednecks with blazing barbecue pits ready for NASCAR racers to drive in circles for hours in cars plastered with beer company and M&Ms advertisements.

Just dropping all these fake patriotic rituals would be a great relief for millions of us, not force professional athletes to choose between obedience and conscience, and would save thousands of hours of airtime on television, not to mention the millions of dollars spent by the US government showing off it’s latest example of overspending on new war toys.  And, how refreshing it would be to get baseball games back to under 4 hours.

Enough already.  Let’s just stop all this goofy jingoism.  Problem solved.