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.

To deflect attention from the fact that virtually no one from the Philadelphia Eagles wanted to visit the WH to celebrate their Super Bowl victory with the worst president in US history, Trump abruptly cancelled the event yesterday, lying on twitter it was because players refused to stand for the anthem.  Lying again by saying that “1,000 Eagles fans” had come to town, Trump slapped together a “patriotic” celebration on the WH south steps with the Marine Band and Army Chorus.  Since there were actually few Eagles fans there, apparently the WH had to hustle up a bunch of staffers to fill out the the crowd on the south lawn.

But the funny part?  Mr. Super Duper Patriot not only doesn’t know the words to the national anthem, he REALLY doesn’t know words to God Bless America.  Have a look, courtesy of The Daily Show:

Americans are weird. No, really; Americans are weird. We play the national anthem, wave flags, and parade active duty military and veterans around before major sports events. EVERY major sports event. Even some little league parks play the national anthem before the little tykes run out on the field to play for 30 minutes.  And we love HUGE flags.  Not just any HUGE flag, cover the entire football field HUGE.  In fact, if you don’t get all weepy when you see that HUGE flag, you’re a reprobate and un-American.  It’s like, “BE PATRIOTIC!  IF YOU’RE NOT PATRIOTIC TO OUR SATISFACTION, WE’LL SLAP IT INTO YOU PATRIOTIC!!! DAMMIT!”

This is a strange custom that is unique to the US. No other country does this Kabuki play every time we gather to watch huge guys beat each other to a pulp.  When did it become tradition to play the Star Spangled Banner before sporting events?  Well, according to an article in Time, the first time the tune was played before a baseball game was during the Civil War in 1862 (before it was declared the national anthem), was played again before the opening game of the World Series in 1918 at the end of WWI, but didn’t really get ingrained in sports until after WWII when loudspeakers replaced live bands and they could play the tune any and every goddam where.

Up until 9/11, it was a tradition with really no controversy.  We’d get up, discreetly sip our beer and wait for the song to be over so we could drink more beer.  However, in 2003, when we invaded Iraq for no good reason,  the US government started using the national anthem before nationally televised games as a propaganda opportunity using veterans and active military as props to whip up all those patriot emotions and tears.  In 2009, the NFL started requiring players to be lined up on the field for the anthem.  The government even started paying the NFL for these displays.  In fact, between 2011 and 2014, the Department of Defense paid over $5 million dollars to the NFL for all the pregame red, white, and blue hoopla.

So, all this televised nationalism is really very recent and has been normalized by bribing the NFL and other major leagues to promote it every week.  It’s not surprising then, that when Colin Kaepernick starting sitting out the anthem as a protest against systematic racism in America, that all the jingoists would go nuts.  After being thoroughly hated on, he was then blackballed from the league even though has has one of the best records in the NFL; he also became the new punching bag for Fox Noise. The whole controversy just kind of rocked along until last week when Tweeto Jesus wandered into the mess looking for something to distract from the Mueller investigation.

Hilariously, the Orange One got more than he bargained for.  Suddenly, the Great Divider actually became the Great Uniter, at least this week, by galvanizing the protest movement.  The pressure on NFL owners is so great now that even THEY are taking a knee on the field, if only just before the anthem than during.  The whole thing is pretty entertaining.

But let’s look at the real issue here…There is a lot of hand wringing by my conservative friends on social media fretting over young athletes daring to disrespect the (flag, veterans, active duty, our country, our patriotism… Insert your descriptor here) _______.  The problem, though, is that they are not doing that.  Not at all. They are exercising their right of free speech – to protest what they see as injustice.

Let’s take other examples of protests:  When Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, was she protesting public transportation?  Of course not.  She was protesting institutionalized racism.  The young black men who sat at the Whites Only lunch counter.  Were they protesting lunch counters?  No, they too were protesting institutionalized racism.  There are many examples of civil disobedience for the greater good, and that is exactly what these young athletes are now doing.  They play a prominent role in our modern culture.  They can have an influence on our society, and they, led bravely by Colin Kaepernick over a year ago, are doing just that.  Good on them.

So, for all my conservative buds who are fretting over this whole thing or burning their cheap Made in China replica jerseys in their trashcans in the backyard, maybe they should just think a little bit about this protest.  Even today we live with the scar of the cancer that was slavery.  Even today, over 150 years after it was ended, we still live with the symptoms.  Even today, we still face institutionalized racism on a daily basis.

This is still a free country, and people can express themselves how they please.  That is what’s happening here and the movement has grown with the inadvertent assist from Tweeto Jesus.

We can be thankful for that, even if we are just a little weird.