Taking the Knee--Football, other sports, the National Anthem. What the heck is going on here?

You can tell exactly how clueless I am about football by the fact that I did not know that we were having a big national crises (flap?) or something until after all the Sunday football games were over.

Now, I don't follow football at all, which is partially why I missed the whole story. And I was really busy last week and over the weekend.  Still, I should have noticed something was going on.  I didn't until I saw some Facebook feed or something and I had to ask my wife, who does follow football, what was up. Even at that I was a bit confused until then if their going to their knee in the National Anthem was intended as a sign of respect (which it could be) or of protest.

Protest, I gather.

I didn't know the full dimensions of it (assuming I do now) until I listened to the weekend news shows on my way up to a distant town for work, and back. 

Now I'm more or less up to speed, I guess, even if I still feel sort of oddly out of it.

To add to the surreal feeling, I've been watching Ken Burns The Vietnam War and therefore I'm getting a dose of 1960s protests at the same time.  Last night's episode death with the 1968 Democratic Convention riots, amongst others, and so there's an odd eerie sense, in some ways, of having been here before.  I was only ten years old when the United States pulled its last combat troops out of Vietnam, but I can actually remember some of the events now being described from 1968.  Frankly, the late 1960s were awful.  Indeed, the whole 1960s were awful, and the 1970s weren't much better.  But I digress.

So apparently, this all started off last year when a football player named Colin Kaepernick, about whom I know nothing whatsoever, took the knee, or perhaps sat down, during the National Anthem at some point during the 2016 season in protest of racism in the United States. At the time he was quoted as saying:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder

This followed all the police shooting incidents prior to that.

From that, the protests spread and since the election of President Trump they've apparently spread further.  I had no idea, really, as I don't follow football and protests in football games have to be pretty darned big in order for me to notice them. Anyhow, Kaepernick's actions come in that context. It's worth noting that something like 70% of the football players in the NFL are black.  He's no longer in the NFL, however, as he became a free agent last year and nobody picked him up, this event widely being believed to be the reason for that.  If so, he's paying a personal penalty for his actions, which is the risk of any such action, while it neither justifies it or condemns it.

Since then, in his extremely odd way, Donald Trump made a comment about the protests recently in a speech, which have spread, to the effect that the owners should fire the SOBs (his words, although I've abbreviated it here) who do this. That caused, in predictable fashion, the protest to spread very widely, apparently, over the weekend.  Trump, in Trump fashion, backed up his comment in Tweet form.

So here we are.

This raises a number of interesting questions.

The first, and most obvious, is why oh why does Trump feel that any moronic concept that wonders through his brain must be spouted out?  It's not dignified.  And if he must spout off, why did he spout off in this fashion?

It makes him look like an idiot, and quite often what he says is not only not dignified, its not smart, or doesn't appear to be.  It's bizarre. Any other President, left or right, would have just not said anything at all or would have said something neutral along the lines of its an honor to live in a country where protests aren't punished.  Indeed, a polished public speaker could have made quiet a bit of political hay out of this by not condemning it and somewhat praising it.  Instead, he throws out something that sounds like it should have come from an all white blue collar urban bar in 1966.  Sort of like what we'd expect some guy to stand up and blurt in South Boston fifty years ago or something.

Which makes me wonder if that's is what he's shooting for, and I'm not alone. That is, the hard core of his base is of the "fire the bums" variety and maybe he's shoring that up, knowing that everyone else weighs the results against the statements and he's not going to gain anyone else's love or admiration anyhow.  If that's right, interpreting it as racist would be incorrect, but interpreting it as sort of an old style, blue collar, crack their heads sort of statement sort of is.  And that's the base he's been tacking to, basically, and they are in both parties, no matter what both parties think of that fact.

If that's the case, he's making a longterm mistake, as he's never going to get the Democrats support on anything much. As a commentator on one of the weekend shows said last week right now the Democrats are held by the "loony left" and that's the case. They're too anemic from their all vegan, gender free, diet to really amount to much but an obstacle.  But the GOP isn't really coming into his corner much either.  It's nearly like a third party, or rather he is, right now.  But how big is that group?  No matter how big it may be, does saying something like this help him that much in that base?

But, I suppose, if "independent" is the nation's biggest political party, and the independents went for Trump in some numbers. . . well maybe I'm wrong.

Well, what about this protest in general?

Frankly, I hardly care.  I feel like I should, but I have a hard time mustering that up.  That's because the appeal of football is so lost on me.

Well, let's start with this. Do they have a right to protest in this fashion?

Technically, probably not.  Or maybe they do.  Everyone has a right to free speech, but they're actually protesting at work, which you really don't have a right to do.  I can't go out front in my office, for example, and protest on company time about something.

This sets this apart, in in my mind, from protests like that of the Black 14 at the University of Wyoming.  That 1969 protest came at a state funded school in a state owned stadium.

 

Memorial  at the University of Wyoming to the Black 14, the fourteen black football players who wore black armbands to a BYU football game in protest of the LDS policy on blacks in clerical roles. They lost their spots on the team.

It also, in my mind, makes it stand apart from the 1968 black power salute protest delivered by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in their medal ceremony, given as that was in a highly public venue and they were there with public funding.

Or maybe it doesn't.

A lot of football stadiums here and there are in fact partially publicly funded. So maybe they are public venues.

Which doesn't mean that the protests are to be celebrated, or the opposite of that.

Does that mean that, if they deemed it in appropriate, they owners could not follow Trump's admonition to fire them.  Well, they aren't public employees so they could. That doesn't mean that they should be.  The exception to this, I'd note, would be players for Green Bay. The city does own that team so they're presumably public employees.  That doesn't mean that they can't be fired either, but it is a different type of deal in that case.

So are these protests wise and valid?

That's in the eyes of the beholder, to be sure.

One thing worth noting, but which rarely is presently, is that a lot has changed since 1968 when Smith and Carlos delivered their radical salute and lost their medals as a result.  That doesn't mean their act was proper (I don't think it was, the Black Power Salute was a lot more than a knee during the National Anthem in the message it conveyed and was derived from an informal salute used by street Communists).  This does not mean that the US has conquered racism.  It hasn't.  Indeed, ironically, we live in an era when much more questionable movements have co-opted the former methods and language of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s which arguably makes it harder for American blacks to easily draw attention to the racism that remains.  But there definitely is some, and shootings of urban blacks are, in spite of what some would claim, a definite problem that needs to be addressed. 

But let's not fool ourselves, it's nothing like ti was in the 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s.  A huge amount of progress has been made, even if more needs to be made.

So am I saying that the protests should be condemned?  No, I'm not.  Once again, I feel so out of it in this context I have a hard time coming to an opinion.  I guess I come to down to this. While I wouldn't do it, and while I feel its over dramatic, I'm not going to get all upset at those who do.  After all, football is, as noted above, a sport in which 70s% of the players are black.

I have to wonder, in some odd way, if that's an example of racism itself.  It seems to me, I'd note, distinctly different from baseball which has a fairly international flavor in regards to its talent (although the protests apparently spread, over the weekend, into baseball with a single baseball player taking the knee).  Football is a brutal sport and the college expression of it is, in some real ways, nothing more than a set of farm teams for the NFL.  Brutal sports have traditionally been the domain of the underprivileged in the United States.  It's no accident that there were so many black, Irish, Italian and Jewish boxers at one time.  People don't take up a sport like that, as a rule, if other less violent career options are open to them.

Or maybe some do.

Still, it makes me wonder if the really weird way in which football players are recruited, by passing them through universities in a fashion which really discredits universities, sort of is subtly racist in ways that are almost impossible for people to appreciate.  Not universally so by any means, but in some subtle fashion.

Well, anyway, taking the knee isn't the most radical protest going, and its better than sitting, which does seem more disrespectful.  Indeed, in some context, taking a knee could easily be mistaken for being very respectful, even though that isn't what is exactly intended.

What isn't respectful, to his office, is the President commenting on it in the fashion he did.  He ought to knock that off. But we all know that he won't.

On one nearly final note, why do we play the National Anthem before games anyway?  That's rather odd, if a person ponders it.  We didn't always do this.  It started in baseball during World War One, although the Star Spangled Banner wasn't yet the National Anthem at the time (and the weekend commentator who stated that the Anthem is itself racist is full of it).  It became the National Anthem in 1931 and spread to football  during World War Two.  Well, okay, but the nation was at war during those periods of adoption.  There's no real reason to keep on playing the National Anthem at sports now.  Indeed, it creates a bizarre sort of patriotic association between the game and the country which perhaps shouldn't really be there.

And on a final note, Trump, no matter what he accomplishes (and things like this deter him from getting things accomplished, and make it hard to see the accomplishments he has made) will not be President forever.  He's not the first outspoken populist President we've ever had. But its hard not to see how the approach he has frequently taken in regards to public speaking and the like won't have damaged the office by the time he's left.  That's going to be something that will not necessarily be easily to repair.  If he won't desist for his own sake, it'd be nice if he'd consider that.