The NFL Protests and the Mass Descent into Total Classless Thuggery
by Alexander Zubatov
This weekend marked a series of national anthem “protests” by highly compensated football players, most of whom have likely sustained a few too many concussions to think their way around complex political issues. Some refused to come out for the anthem. Some came out but kneeled. Others locked arms. Some even thought the national anthem would be a good time to do a black power salute or just get some good glute and quad stretches in: https://www.facebook.com/13WHAM/videos/10155840945897502/
While the woefully out-of-touch mainstream media’s reaction to this sad spectacle was overwhelmingly laudatory — as though these were noble heroes standing up for truth and justice rather than classless thugs spitting upon their country and their fans in a mass display of disrespect — choruses of boos rang out from stadium crowds across the nation. And, if the NFL ratings decline and fan exodus in response to Colin Kaepernick’s antics is any guide, I strongly suspect that by failing to rein in the dogs and tell its well-heeled employees to stick to doing their jobs while on company time and on the company’s dime, the NFL is well on its way to becoming the No Future League.
The real story here is how dumb, incoherent, boorish and utterly out of step with America so many in the left-leaning mainstream entertainment community (including Hollywood, media and now sports as well) have become. Ad hominem epithets, name-calling (racist!, fascist!, sexist!) and shouting down people with whom those on the left disagree have taken the place of engagement, debate and reasoned dialogue, and now these same jeering jerks are turning football stadiums into arenas for their jihads against civility.
Let’s step back and think through what’s going on. This should be simple. Let’s say you are Christian and you get invited to the wedding of a friend who is of a different faith to which you don’t subscribe and aspects of which you might even find distasteful or offensive. When the religious parts of the ceremony are going on, no one is expecting you to join the chorus or pray to a divinity that’s not your own. But standing or sitting respectfully, as appropriate, while others are doing what they do and saying what they say is de rigueur. Unless babies are being sacrificed at the altar, this isn’t the time to make a political statement, take exception or stage a protest. The same is true of national patriotic rituals. When I was in school, I never once spoke the words of the pledge of allegiance (I’m just not one of those flag-waving, USA! USA!-chanting types), but I sure as heck stood there respectfully and silently while others were doing as they saw fit. To do anything less would have been rude; it would have been making a spectacle of myself, and that wasn’t my goal.
By the same token, no one is forcing NFL players to put their hands on their hearts and belt out every word of The Star-Spangled Banner like they mean it when this inoffensive ritualistic exercise is going on. If they stood respectfully and silently, that would’ve been more than enough in my book (and, I suspect, in the books of the overwhelming majority of fans). But when you start kneeling, bowing your head in shame or doing “black power” salutes while the song is being sung, then you’ve crossed the line and become a distracting doofus. You’re insulting people. You’re using someone else’s moment of purely ceremonial reverence to throw a sharp elbow and shove your way onto center-stage with a pointed political protest. This is why most NFL fans had no trouble intuitively seeing right through Colin Kaepernick’s superficial political statement and discerning the narcissistic, low-character, me-first millionaire trying to put his over-inflated “I” in “team” and making the game about himself. And it is why these same fans and more will have no trouble selling their seats and clicking the “OFF” switches on their remotes when the nitwits of the No Future League come on to disrespect and insult them. They’ll send the bozos a clear message: if you can’t stand by respectfully during the national anthem, then don’t expect us to sit by respectfully (much less cheer you on) and watch you insulting us to our faces.
Many in the media and among the liberal elites (a class to which most NFL owners, but not most NFL fans, belong) will make excuses for these classless thugs and ill-mannered boors by pointing to the larger cause that is the alleged subject of their protests. In reality, however, neither I nor most fans nor, most likely, even the players themselves know precisely what it is they are protesting. Can anyone tell me exactly what these “protests” are about? About a non-existent, repeatedly empirically discredited media-hyped “epidemic” of police officer killings of blacks? About racial injustice in general? What racial injustice? The voguish idea that any instance when blacks — 12%-13% of the U.S. population who, if you just tune in the “mainstream” news, sometimes seem like they’re closer to 85% — are under-represented in any positive category in our society and over-represented in any negative category in our society, some combo of overt racism, unconscious racism and institutional racism must surely be to blame? If you think you know what the protests are about, then answer this simple question: who exactly is supposed to change what exactly in order for these protests to stop?
It comes down to this: if these football players have something to say and a point to make, I have no idea what it is, but I do know this: no one is denying them their freedom of speech, but if they want to protest The Star-Spangled Banner, they’d be best advised to start singing their own tune on their own time. When the game comes on, it’s our time, a national pastime. And if we don’t start seeing them getting up off their knees and limiting their on-field displays to the tackle, the run and the pass, then we’ll be the ones doing the passing.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
