George Rebane

More and more NFL players, owners, and managers started showing their disrespect for one of our nation’s most hallowed totems – The Star-Spangled Banner.  They chose to do this for a number of political reasons starting with protesting alleged police brutality.  And in doing so they have the temerity to claim that their acts of disrespect are not unpatriotic but intended to show “unity”.  That’s bullshit.

Whatever their sentiments are about civil rights violations and governments’ overreach, they have many other ways (e.g. a protest patch on their uniforms) to exhibit their feelings that need not desecrate the totems of our unique and special nation; hallowed symbols that have gathered Americans for generations to visibly demonstrate to each other that ‘e pluribus unum’ works and is the underlying rationale for living civil and productive lives together.  And in such unseemly public acts these people also dishonor those many who have given life and limb to defend and preserve those symbols of our nation.

If these people – ungrateful millionaires all – choose such overt and crass actions to demonstrate their unity, then to me and mine they have come together to achieve different ends through means neither of which I condone nor can unite.  When they knee our national anthem, they are simply cranking another notch ratcheting toward our Great Divide.

[27sep17 update]  Jason Riley in the 27sep17 WSJ (here) covers today’s national anthem brouhaha, and brings up a couple of points with which I happened to agree and did not include in the above.  As a youngster, Riley’s Jehovah’s Witness religious teachings did not allow him to salute the flag or honor our national anthem, which he first started doing as a teenager when he left that church.  JWs were often persecuted (beyond shunning) by their neighbors for these omissions which highlighted their different beliefs.

A relevant 1943 SCOTUS ruling stated that government or any of its agencies (e.g. public schools) forcing someone to salute the flag was unconstitutional.  More cogently, the court held that “saluting the flag is a form of utterance and that the right to not speak is as equally protected under the First Amendment as the right to free speech.” (emphasis mine) And “to believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

Now critical minds will understand the difference between public enforcement and enforcement of private sector policies of which the kneeling athletes are in violation.  And, of course, all of us are free to shun anyone on any grounds as we please.  (At least we had that freedom during the progressives’ bad old days; today things are not so simple anymore.)  We don’t have to watch them play or buy their sponsors’ products.  As I stated above, I and mine are of a mind to do exactly that with anyone who disses the good ol’ US of A.

In the end, “team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.”  And here Riley points out the most ludicrous part of the current kneeing epidemic – their putative casus belli, as I pointed out above, is existentially bullshit.

Why?  Because all available data from national and regional police databases show that police-involved shootings have dropped drastically in the last decades while the allegedly afflicted populations have grown enormously.  Riley quotes the relevant stats, and correctly concludes – “An increase in press coverage of police shootings isn’t the same thing as an increase in police shootings.”