On one level, it does seem just as cold and calculated as the old days, when the NFL was swapping salutes for cash. If you have to threaten someone into showing respect, whatever they end up showing isn’t respect but a simulation of it for someone else’s consumption. The fact that the rule has already been made public just means that everyone is aware that this is the portion of the game when the NFL forces its players to stand still while they play a song, or else. The meaning of it all washes out; the fines make it entirely situational: It’s a workplace compliance issue, a matter of the NFL making its performers sell its customers what they want to buy. The content is meaningless.
From Mike’s 10 Commandments:
2. Be true to the ideal, not just to the symbol.
- and -
If not money, then what? There is the evident racial component, bolstered by the bizarre involvement of the president, which has everything to do with disciplining black people in public, a long-running American obsession. But I suspect there’s something more, something wider and stranger, at the root of all this fury over a few athletes quietly kneeling during their country’s anthem. For one, there’s the straightforward fact that kneeling isn’t a sign of disrespect, and nobody brought up in a country with the faintest hint of Christian culture actually thinks it is. As Luke Bretherton, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University, wrote last year in The Post: “New Testament stories describe people who kneel before Jesus in supplication or lament. With their kneeling, these biblical figures say: Something is desperately wrong, please hear us and use your power to help us. Their act of submission signals their faith that healing will come and their prayers will be answered.”- and a tweet:
The NFL just banned players from kneeling during the national anthem.— Millennial Politics (@MillenPolitics) May 23, 2018
Take a look at the image below.
Three of these men are mass murderers & three of them didn’t kill anybody.
Can you spot the difference in their mugshots?
This is why we kneel. #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/9pOdawG8Bd
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