Culture

The NFL Kneeling Controversy

Rev. Steve Schlissel - October 21, 2017

I’m seriously interested in discovering whether American football fans have a scale of values which ranks truth, liberty, honor, history, reality, sacrifice and wisdom ABOVE a game. If there was ever a more transparent instance of hollow gliberalism, I can’t recall it. The NFL has decided they can empty their collective bladder on all Americans and then address these same Americans as if they were morons, telling them “It’s raining.” And the NFL seems to believe they will suffer no major consequences as a result. No lab could set up a more perfect experiment. Here we have what is needed to get an indisputably accurate barometer reading of where we REALLY are.

This single instance of gliberal overreach, this out-of-all-bounds leftist hypocrisy and stupidity, this severe provocation to all sound thought has the potential to be the instance we look back on–for good or for ill–for years and years to come. If the NFL is right and they CAN treat all America, Americans and American symbols contemptuously yet STILL count on the free and continuous support of these same Americans, then Hillary did win after all, then what’s left of America is so pathetic, impotent, self-absorbed, blind, dumb and servile that her external enemies will clearly see what easy pickings we are–and the entire great experiment is already over in principle and will fall to outside forces momentarily.

But if the left miscalculated here, if the unmistakable “Are you Americans worth anything at all?”-nature of this this particular provocation is met with a clear, equally unmistakable, “We are not standing still for this and you provocateurs can rot,” if this is the Tea Party for the 21st century, if Americans find they have more love for being American than they do for a game that mocks them, then we may well be looking at the popular-culture analog to Trump’s presidential victory. As a culture observer for decades, I can honestly say I’ve not seen another instance so perfectly positioned and poised to provide certainty to those who want to know, Are we beyond redemption altogether? CONCLUSION A: If football fans continue to attend and continue to watch, that is, if they ACCEPT the “rain” lie, then we will know for a certainty that there is, between our coasts, no longer a people worth fighting for. For no excuse could be manufactured which could possibly excuse men from making a commitment to an action that costs so little yet could do so much. All that is required is NOTHING–i.e., that we do NOTHING toward, for or in favor of the NFL–no games, no viewing, no jersey purchases, etc. Whether such a course feels burdensome will be determined entirely by how heavily the provocation weighs upon each American football fan (that is WHY it is such a perfect test).

But to garner a reading favoring the opposite conclusion, i.e., CONCLUSION B, requires that a people have been prodded to a wakefulness, to an awareness which is accompanied by echoes of, “We have not yet begun to fight!” That is, encouragement regarding our national condition can be justified only if the reaction and confrontation with the NFL is clear, decisive, unmistakable. Any namby-pamby, indistinct, less than crippling punishment of the NFL–any posture toward the despisers which is not fully determined to last past their first faint pleas that we “Come back, please”–ought to be read as evidence favoring CONCLUSION A. I, for one, will be watching whether people will be watching–and I’ll be watching intently.