“Take me out to the Ballgame…
Professional sports are coming back…sort of. Baseball games are taking place in empty parks with cut out images of fans occupying the seats. Meanwhile the NBA has sequestered their teams in Florida like Trappist monks to finish their season. No fans at the various courts either. Pro football is gearing up for a limited season. Almost normality…maybe.
Not so fast. What we do have in abundance is social justice sloganeering, kneeling and National Anthem boycotts. “Black Lives Matter” painted on basketball courts, “BLM” stenciled on the pitcher’s mound and decals on football helmets. WNBA players walked off the court when the National Anthem was played. Baseball players kneeling during the anthem.
Remember the good old days when sports were supposed to be an escape from the realities of day to day life. What’s really tragic about this is twofold. One, most of these pro athletes have no clue that BLM is a Marxist organization that doesn't give a damn about black lives because if they did, they would be rallying for the end of the senseless black on black murders in Chicago. Two, they have no clue that if they tried this protest in communist China, they would find themselves with the Uighurs in a slave labor camp.
Legendary Chicago Bear player and coach, Mike Ditka said in a recent interview; "If you can't respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country, that's the way I feel. Of course, I'm old fashioned, so I'm only going to say what I feel. You don't protest against the flag and you don't protest against this country who's given you the opportunities to make a living playing a sport that you never thought would happen. So, I don't want to hear all the crap."
Ditka doesn’t mince words that’s for sure. Make no mistake there is nothing wrong with peaceful meaningful protest but do it on your time not your employer’s time. How many folks would get away with this activism at their current jobs. Not many.
Sam Coonrod, a San Francisco Giant relief pitcher, was the single baseball player who refused to take a knee this past weekend in Los Angeles when the Giants played the Dodgers. Sam is not exactly a household name, but he might be one now. He said, “I’m a Christian… I just can’t get on board with a couple things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter, how they lean towards Marxism. And … they said some negative things about the nuclear family. I just can’t get on board with that.”
Sam is catching it from the usual leftist loons who claim he’s hiding being behind his religion. Sam might have been the only man on the field who knew that there are only two times that a man kneels, to pray to his God and to propose marriage.
These mostly millionaire professional athletes currently demonstrate a painful ignorance of how lucky they are to play the games of childhood. Their forum is such that they can be the instruments of positive constructive change, instead, like lemmings they buy into the latest movement du jour without one iota of investigative curiosity.
It used to be that players realize that conservatives and liberals bought sports attire and stayed out of the political arena. But now with sports giants like Nike, endorsing the rhetoric of Colin Kaepernick, all bets are off.
With the Chinese pandemic front and center, these pros may find themselves shortly without any season and thus their imposition of one particular view or activism regarding the flag or national anthem, may not have a long shelf life. Just as Black Lives Matter is a significant statement but not to the exclusion of “All Lives Matter”, and the National Anthem celebrates a country with freedom not found anywhere else in the world.
…Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks.”