Working alone in a one-man office, I sometimes whether or not the world is imploding outside, and I'm just watching it through my pane-glad windows. Yes, usually I meet and visit with people several times a day, but there are whole blocks of two or three hours in which I am alone with my thoughts, with prayer, with Scripture. I surf around the internet when I take breaks or listen to some music, but I will go hours at a time having no contact with any other humans.
Recently Colin Kapernick, a not-very-good quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, decided to stage a protest, refusing to stand during the national anthem. Why he did so may or may not be irrelevant...something about the injustice of our world, which seems ironic in that his protest comes from a man in the top .00001% of wage earners in our country for playing a game.
Naturally, of course, the internet has blown up. Most of the people I have seen commenting on this are outraged...how can you not stand? How unpatriotic! How unAmerican! Of course, I have wondered why we are so intent on playing this song before sporting events even as we do not do so before movies or other forms of live entertainment. In truth I feel that playing it as often as we do cheapens its meaning...indeed, I often have been at games in which people stand up reluctantly, hardly paying attention to it, wondering how to hold their drink in one hand and put their hand over their heart with their other for a minute and fifteen seconds even as they keep an eye on four restless kids. We do our patriotic salute and we move on. We hear it so often that it loses its meaning.
Yet I never cease to be amazed at how easy it is to manufacture outrage over something like this. The same people who get so worked up over how this world is becoming so politically correct ("Why are people so mad that I said ______? They [usually a minority or liberal group] need to get over it!") are now acting as if Kapernick has spit on the flag and set it ablaze as he screams Muslim praises.
I could spout the usual liberal response, that freedom means that we listen to what somebody is saying even as we don't like it...but in the end I'm just so tired of it all. Maybe I need to close my blinds a little bit more, stop surfing the internet on my breaks, and just shut out the world. I can't handle any more outrage today, thank you.
