Yesterday was the first day Black History Month. These collection of news stories were bound to happen, but it is still amazing nonetheless. The first one is one you all know well. The backlash against the 1619 Project and so-called critical race theory has been ongoing. In the midst of all that chaos, numerous states have chosen to limit what teachers can teach their students during this month. For instance, we can talk about Jackie Robinson, but we can’t talk about why there was a color barrier in the first place. We can talk about Martin Luther King Jr, but we can’t delve too deeply.

The end result is that multiple generations of Americans believe MLK had a dream. They’ll quote the dream and even misquote it in order to pretend that he would support policies that further subjugate people. Meanwhile, we have students that think he freed the slaves, was the first black president, and a precious few seem to think he was related to Martin Luther.

It’s in this backdrop that the second news story makes even more sense. Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores started a class action lawsuit against the NFL charging systemic racism and racist practices. While it certainly wasn’t the most shocking revelation, the fact that Bill Belichek accidentally texted him and congratulated him for getting the Giants job (thinking he was Brian Daboll) before he interviewed. His interview was simply to comply with the Rooney Rule that mandates at least two interviews with minority candidates.

A league that has a 70 percent African American player population has one black head coach for 32 teams. There are three minority coaches combined amongst those 32. That’s impossible to defend. I’m sure teams like the Giants, Dolphins, and Broncos (who were specifically named in the suit) can somehow defend their hires and their decisions. I’m sure most teams can. That’s the difference between systemic racism and overt racism.

Hardly anyone comes right out and says it anymore. We are all too smart and too sophisticated for that. However, when the vast majority of the owners are white then they will hire white executives most of the time. Those executives will hire people that they know and have worked with. They turn out to be white most of the time. Head coaches hire assistants they’ve worked with before and they turn out to be white most of the time. I think everyone knows the score.

Ultimately, we don’t grow if we don’t force ourselves to acknowledge some painful truths. We can argue about intention until we are blue in the face. We can assert that we don’t hate anyone because of their race, ethnicity, country of origin, or religion. We can argue vehemently that we aren’t racist and even believe it down to our core.

Many of us can do so with a straight face. Yet, it’s hard to look around and not see the results of a society that has been systematically unfair for decades. Now, many of us are barred from pointing that out. We don’t want kids to feel bad. There’s a fine line between assigning blame in the present day or simply being aware that a discrepancy exists. We didn’t cause the discrepancy, but if we don’t acknowledge it we can’t move on. Then, it will be our fault.

The wild world of sports and politics rarely collide, but they did so last week when two assistant coaches in the NFL lost their jobs because they refused to get the vaccine. One of them was former Houston Texans assistant Rick Dennison.

The NFL can’t fire players for refusing to get the vaccine because they have a collective bargaining agreement that bars such action, but you can believe if a player is on the bubble and refused to get the shot, he will likely be out on the street. While the league is not barring players from performing, they are highly incentivizing getting the vaccine.

If a player tests positive without getting the vaccine it could cause his team to forfeit a game. If that happens then no one on either team will get their paycheck. Money is always a great motivator and when you are talking as much as one million dollars in the form of a game check you better believe there will be peer pressure.

However, this is where we get to the point of asking how we even got here in the first place. There are people that are incapable of getting vaccines. They might suffer an allergic reaction or they have some other medical reason why they cannot. While I question it, there are also folks that have a religious objection. I’m not talking about these folks.

Other countries have both sets of folks within their borders and yet have found a way to get more than 70 percent of people 12 and older vaccinated. The U.S. isn’t quite to 50 percent. It is that gap that threatens to keep the virus going through the next several years. It is a merry band of idiots that are either questioning the safety of the vaccine or the efficacy of the vaccine. Then again, I don’t think they are using big words like efficacy.

At the heart of this debate are the rights of the individual and how far they extend. Everyone has the right to be a dumbass up until the exercising of their rights interfere with my safety. We’ve done this for years. Students have to have certain vaccinations by certain dates to be able to attend school. I’m not sure why COVID is so different.

I’m not sure why we have to be so stupid about this. In the past several months, the Texas Education Agency has decided to not fund virtual learning, but students under 12 can’t get vaccinated. Then, you have only 50 percent of those eligible getting vaccinated. If just one of those facts were mitigated somehow we would be okay. Yet, here we are stuck on freedumb. You can’t force me to do a solid for my neighbors and my community.

A party that is supposedly dedicated to life seems to be treating everyone’s life cavalierly. The irony if palpable. We made everyone get the polio vaccine and we eradicated it from the face of the earth. We did the same with small pox. We currently require measles and mumps vaccinations. They’ve even added one for chicken pox. I’m still struggling to understand why this is so difficult.

This morning, Karen Attiah contributed a piece in the Washington Post about how it’s time to cancel the NFL.  She summarizes the sorry history of the league as pertains to not only race, but to life threatening brain injury and other chronic injuries that result when 300 lb. guys smash into each other for years.  She also points out that the NFL teams have a terrible track record regarding domestic abuse and treating their players more like assets than people.  The league owners are generally ultra-conservative zillionaires who, as Attiah notes, run their teams with “plantation style” politics and tactics.  Said zillionaires are also more than happy to take billions of dollars from taxpayers for their new stadiums, then complain about taxes they have to pay taxes on the billions of dollars that flow into their pockets from people who pays upwards of several thousands of dollars a seat per game to watch 300 lb. guys try to kill and maim each other.  The whole thing is Orwellian.

After this last decision where players must stay in the locker room rather than exercise their right to free speech, I have to say that I’m pretty much done, too.  It’s not a big stretch for me since I love baseball, especially Astros baseball, WAY more, but I’ve enjoyed watching holiday games, and certainly the Super Bowl.  But it’s time to take a stand.  Maybe if the owners are hit in the wallet will their hearing improve.

Yesterday, in a high profile example of profound tone deafness, the NFL announced that its team owners have agreed that any team which has a player who kneels during the national anthem will be fined by the league.  Interestingly, the decision was made without consulting with the NFL players’ union.  The decision was an attempt to make the controversy around NFL players’ protests of police brutality go away by making those protests not about police brutality, but disrespecting the flag and the song.  That accusation is not, and never has been, true.

For now, let’s set aside the appropriateness of all the super duper displays of patriotism at sporting events today.  It seems that you can’t attend any event, including 5 year old kids’ soccer games, without the obligatory playing of the national anthem.  The big leagues have taken all the flag waving to nauseating heights, parading military personnel out on the field between quarters and innings, doing the obligatory (and corny) on-field reunions of veteran-come-home and their families, competing for what team can get the gigantastigest flag out onto the field, and having everyone from Little Big Town to opera singers to sing the song.  Major league baseball has even taken the rituals to a whole new height where, not only does everyone now stand, put hand over heart and sing the national anthem before the game, now we have to stand, put hand over the heart and sing God Bless America before we can sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the seventh inning stretch.  Am I the only one to think all this military ritual is stupid?

What’s really important about this issue is all this jingoism and flag waving only started after Bush trumped up (no pun intended) non-existent evidence of Saddam’s WMD and invaded Iraq.  To whip up his base, he and his propagandists (read Dick Cheney and pals) started accusing those who disagreed about the war  as being unAmerican.  Remember being publicly chastised and accused of “hating the troops” if you disagreed?  I do.  In 2009, when the Defense Department started PAYING for military tributes before big games, the NFL adopted a policy of requiring players to not only be on the field, but requiring them to render respect for the entire ordeal.  Before then?  The players stayed in the locker rooms during the national anthem.

The NFL’s decision to now fine teams for their players exercising their right to free speech is nothing more than playing to their own base and pandering to Trump who has fanned the flames of hatred of African American players who dared to step out of line.  The entire controversy could be averted in two other ways:  1) stop requiring employees of the league to participate in patriotic rituals, or 2) actually address the content of the protests, the actual problem of police brutality against racial minorities.  But, no.  The NFL owners have cowardly made it about the flag and the song, just like Trump has, to avoid dealing with the actual issue.

Oh, and one last thing – while the NFL owners are getting all dewy-eyed over their love of the flag, and anthem, they’re selling THESE on their websites.

Oh, and this nice little piece is being sold by MLB:

Can you spell hypocrisy?

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.

While the media was obsessing this weekend over Trump’s latest foul-mouthed tirade, his staff extended the Muslim travel ban and Republicans in the Senate wrote in more payoffs to hold out Senators to get them to vote for gutting the US healthcare system.  This has become a common occurrence since Cheeto Jesus infested the WH, and I don’t believe it’s a strategy put in place by him; I believe it’s a strategy developed by very evil and very smart people who are exploiting his proclivity for attention-getting bombast.

Trump’s childish tirades and embarrassing behavior are well known.  They’re also predictably unpredictable.  Almost every time he engages in outrageous behavior, his staff slips something out to the public – unwinding environmental protections, rounding up immigrants, issuing some other cringe-inducing executive order.

This weekend, Trump attacked NFL and NBA players for various fake affronts.  Steph Curry declined to come to the WH with his NBA team, so Trump rescinded the invitation in a Twitter based insult.  Later, in one of his silly campaign rallies, this time in Alabama in support of appropriately named Luther Strange, Trump started his war on NFL players who refuse to stand for the national anthem as a form of protest against violence against racial minorities by police.

During the ensuing firestorm, his staff issued a new travel ban, adding countries to the existing ban that has been blocked by the courts.  Also, under the cover of this circus, Senate Republicans added payoffs for Arizona, Kentucky, and Alaska to the latest effort to destroy healthcare for millions of Americans in an effort to get yes votes from John McCain, Rand Paul, and Lisa Murkowski.

Stayed outraged.  But pay attention.