Scott's Brain Meat: Taking a Stand on the Controversial Knee

I don’t follow football. I don’t watch it, I have no opinion regarding the people who play it, and I exert very little energy towards even acknowledging it as a cultural experience. Outside of the occasional Super Bowl commercial, I have never spent as much time reading about it or listening to heated debates regarding it until the past two weeks. Even when Colin Kaepernick first made the news by kneeling during the national anthem, I didn’t give it a second glance. After all, it isn’t like this country doesn’t get itself all worked up over patriotism and acts of protest. I grew up during the height of the whole flag burning thing. Nothing new to see here. So why am I actually writing about Football players and patriotism? I think you know the reason why.

English: Dorothea Lange picture of Japanese-American children reciting the pledge of allegiance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Before I touch on that reason, a little backstory on my dog in this hunt. I attended high school at Bloomfield High School in Bloomfield, NJ (And for the record, yes, BHS can go fuck itself). The standing rule at the time (late eighties, early nineties) was that students were required to stand and place their hand on their chest during the Pledge of Allegiance, but they were not required to actually recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I have no idea how or why this specific rule came about, but I do know that I followed these guidelines by standing every morning, but never actually reciting the pledge.

I assure you, I was not protesting anything specific at the time. My reluctance – I can’t truthfully say refusal, since technically nobody was trying to force me – to verbally pledge allegiance to my country of birth had nothing to do with the multiple rational (or even irrational) reasons one might choose to give America the silent treatment, as it were. My reasoning had more to do with the logic, or lack thereof, involved in the entire production. As a fat kid, I had already spent years being emotionally and physically assaulted with constant reminders that I was not considered part of whatever group bullies and their enablers assume to speak for. My pre-high school experiences in communal exclusion made it even harder to swallow the concept of “school pride,” and exposed the hypocrisy in asking me to actively support and root for a group of people that at best didn’t give a shit about me, and at worst actively bullied and shunned me. It wasn’t just the actions of my fellow students that made school spirit a joke, the school itself was often criminally negligent and openly apathetic towards individual students like myself. Forcing me to spend an hour in a crowded auditorium “supporting” the school’s football team (fuck the Bengals) was not just a joke, it was a bad joke.

SECOND GRADERS PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE IN ROCKPORT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL - NARA - 548243 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It wasn’t much of a leap for my teenage self to correlate school spirit with national pride. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any national pride than it was that I didn’t see the logic in a daily mandatory public display of it. As high school students, we had already been taught about the ruthless dictatorships that demanded unwavering allegiance, and how America was so much better than other countries because we were allowed to publicly dissent. As American’s we were allowed to believe in anything we wanted to, even if that meant not believing in the government. Yet here I was, being forced to stand and salute every morning. Not only did this morning ritual of ceremonial worship contradictory to the concept of freedom of speech and thought, it also didn’t make sense in the regard that it didn’t accomplish anything. There is nothing educational about reciting a pledge to avoid punishment, and for the casual observer (which there never was), it would be impossible to discern which students actually believed in the pledge, and how many were just following orders. By the way, you know who else followed orders? That’s right, the Nazis. But I digress…

So fast forward to 2017, in an America where football players are kneeling during the national anthem, and the country is waging yet another heated debate over how free our freedom of speech truly is. And let’s clarify the situation here: This was all originally about ONE ATHLETE kneeling during the national anthem to protest the national trend of unarmed black men and children being killed by law enforcement officers who frequently go unpunished. It wasn’t until the President of the United States decided to weigh in on the whole thing by tweeting that American citizens should be fired from their jobs for exercising their constitutional rights, as well as publicly calling peaceful protesters “sons of bitches,” that dozens of other athletes started taking a knee during the national anthem in support of the first guy that started doing it. In short, all of the kneeling going on now is in support of the right of somebody else to take a knee during a national anthem in protest.

Crazy, huh?

And so, as usual, the original reason for the controversial action is forgotten, and the reason behind the increased support is lost or ignored, by the majority of the people both attacking and defending the most benign act of public civil protest you could possibly imagine. Seriously. Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem is no greater a gesture than me not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in high school. Of course, to be fair, I was just a stupid white kid in a classroom annoyed at being told what to do, while Kaepernick is a wealthy black athlete being watched on national television by an audience that is at least (statistically speaking) partially comprised of bigoted racists. Oh, and the President of the United States didn’t use his platform as a world leader to call me names and demand my expulsion. So there’s that.

Here are some questions you should be asking if you are actively debating this kerfuffle (be sure to do your own research, and please cite your references):

Why is the National Anthem played before sporting events?

Is it legally mandatory to “respect” a public display of Nationalism?

Does the U.S. Constitution allow for legally mandated Patriotism?

Here are some additional questions you should ask yourself (research isn’t required, but it is recommended):

How does someone else’s Patriotism, or lack thereof, directly affect you?

If your opinion actually matters, does it matter more than, less than, or as much as the kneeling Athlete?

Exactly how involved should our country’s leaders be involved in the behavior of professional athletes?

Would you be less outraged if the person in question was a white football player kneeling during the National Anthem in support of Cliven Bundy?

If a football player kneels during the National Anthem in a forest with nobody to witness it, would Trump still tweet about it?

Does someone else’s lack of Patriotism strengthen or diminish your own Patriotism?

For those upset that I have yet to definitively state a binary opinion on the issue that they can easily reject or claim victory over, I defer to my teenage self for an official statement, as I seriously doubt the logic involved has changed much in the last twenty-five years or so:

Being forced to pledge allegiance to something is dumb. Denying someone the freedom to choose how to react to a symbol that stands for freedom of expression is dumb. Being upset because somebody doesn’t worship something the same way you do is dumb.

But, most importantly, football is dumb.