Symbols versus human beings.

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  • September 26, 2017 at 10:11 pm #75084
    Avatar photoBilly_T
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    I think this recent debate, controversy, battle or whatever one wants to call it, concerning the NFL players taking a knee, screams out for us to choose. And while there are all kinds of complicated aspects to this, nuance aplenty, competing visions, etc. etc. . . . I think essentially it boils down to this:

    What is more important to you:

    1. Your perception of how an abstract, non-human symbol is supposedly being treated.
    2. Or the way systemic racism, police brutality and economic and social inequalities harms, destroys or kills actually existing human beings.

    What matters to you? A piece of cloth and one’s misunderstanding of its place in this debate (which is not at all)? Or actual oppression of human beings?

    To me, it’s not even a debate. I couldn’t care less about non-human abstract symbols, really, especially not when they’re used by a president to foment division or help beat culture-war drums. And the more people push for our forced, lock-step, mindless reverence toward these meaningless symbols, the more I just want to say, Fuck the flag. Fuck the national anthem. Fuck all of these jingoistic displays of xenophobic rah rah rah.

    I care about human beings, not pieces of cloth.

    Beyond all of that, no player is protesting the flag, or “America.” They’re protesting horrible shit that happens IN America. I’m honestly appalled by the viciousness directed toward people who do that, and it boggles the mind when some people think their emotional attachments to a piece of cloth count more than that horrible shit.

    IMO, the people on that side of the debate are dead wrong, and I hope they wake up and smell the rank koolaid they’ve been led to drink. I hope they do before someone gets killed again for protesting injustice. America has a long, bloody history of that happening too.

    September 26, 2017 at 10:20 pm #75086
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    And a side note to all of this? I’ve actually been surprised that so few people are talking about the national anthem itself and its author, Francis Scott Key. The players aren’t. I don’t hear pundits talking about it. But they should.

    Why? Because Francis Scott Key was a slave-owner who later defended slave-owners in court who were trying to capture runaway slaves. And the lyrics of the third stanza — which is conveniently never sung — actually champion slavery.

    It needs to be repealed and replaced, immediately. And I also think we need to debate the playing of ANY anthem before sporting events, and especially the militaristic displays, brought to you care of our tax dollars and a special deal between the Defense Department and the NFL to push nationalistic, jingoistic, militarized claptrap.

    Want politics out of sports? Let’s stop injecting it in the form of faux-patriotism and lock-step displays before every game. That’s already “politicizing” the hell out of the games. Save that for the 4th or other special events.

    September 26, 2017 at 10:40 pm #75089
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    I just bumped into this article. It’s really good on the topic of the politicization of the NFL prior to Kaepernick.

    How We Can Get Partisan Politics Out of Football By Eric Levitz

    Excerpt:

    Now, imagine a world where the Department of Defense paid the NFL $5.4 million to perform tributes to veterans between 2012 and 2015; ceased making said payments upon John McCain’s disapproval; and then allowed the NFL to continue the practice voluntarily after that. (Oh, and most of the stadiums where these Pentagon-friendly messages were being delivered were built with taxpayer funds.)

    In other words, imagine the world we live in — and then ask yourself, again, whether a player who declined to participate in a ritual tribute to the American military (including one involving the recitation of the national anthem accompanied by militaristic pageantry) would be inserting politics into the situation, or reacting to politics that had already been inserted?

    The point of this thought experiment is simple: The NFL was chock-full of “politics” long before Colin Kaepernick decided to use his share of the league’s spotlight to call attention to discriminatory policing.

    Those decrying Kaepernick and other NFL players for “bringing politics” into football, then, do not actually object to the politicization of the game, per se. In fact, President Trump and his allies are fiercely defensive of a specific brand of football politics: one that insists that American soldiers never lose their lives in ill-conceived and unjust wars of choice, but only in defense of “our freedoms”; that posits reverence for the armed forces and the symbols of the American state as the unifying foundations of U.S. civil society; that imagines all of our nation’s fallen soldiers as a monolithic group of Über-patriots, all of whom would be more offended by an NFL player’s failure to stand for the national anthem than by the routine, legally sanctioned murder of unarmed African-Americans by the government they gave their lives in defense of; and, finally, that views black professional athletes as beneficiaries of our nation’s wealth, rather than participants helping to create it, and consequently expects said athletes to demonstrate gratitude for the opportunities that (white) America has bestowed upon them.

    (An important and relevant link, within the above article, to an Op Ed by Eric Reid. Well worth reading in its entirety: Op-Ed Contributor Eric Reid: Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee)

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