Patriots take fire while the posers just wave the flag

America is filled with hypocrites, and sports fans are the biggest ones. If you’re booing football players on Sunday for taking a knee during the national anthem, then are as quiet as a loser’s locker room on Monday when a cop kills an unarmed driver with a broken tail light because he mistook his insurance document for a lethal weapon, then you’re a hypocrite.

If you’re a team owner, like Jerry Jones, and you threaten to bench any player who refuses to stand for the national anthem, then coddle hulking linemen and running backs who abuse women without consequence or remorse, then you’re a hypocrite.

If you’re the President of the United States, and you think grown men, grown black men, are “sons of bitches” for peacefully protesting police brutality and racial discrimination, then use the words “very fine people” to describe some of the marchers at a violent white supremacy rally that got a woman killed, then you, with all due respect, are a hypocrite.

You’re a hypocrite because you have used a political smoke screen to co-opt a harmless statement about justice and equality and turned it into a referendum on flag waving and patriotism.

Patriots fight and sacrifice and stand up for what is right in ways that improve their country and make better the lives of people they will never know.

Many do it bravely in combat, in a Humvee that rolls over a land mine, or in a helicopter that crashes during a secret rescue mission.

Patriots are people like John McCain (below right), who spent years in a POW camp and came home still burning with the desire to serve — only to be insulted by then-candidate Trump for being captured and, later, for blocking attempts to dismantle Obamacare.

But there have been other patriots, men and women who never wore a uniform or a flag pin on their lapel.

There were soldiers like boxer Muhammad Ali (below left), whose biggest fight was in a courtroom to battle a government that convicted him of a crime — leading to the loss of his heavyweight title — after he refused to go overseas and take part in what he viewed as an unjust war.

You’re going to tell me that Muhammad Ali, who earned an Olympic gold medal for the United States, and literally carried the torch for his country, wasn’t a patriot?

Patriotism is about more than saluting the flag and singing a song when a sporting event starts. It’s about standing up for all, all it represents.

So if standing up means speaking out, then take a deep breath and speak out for the whole world to hear.

If standing up means getting knocked down sometimes, then get back up and stand again.

And if standing up means taking a knee, even in a stadium filled with 50,000 people while a military band plays “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then take a knee.

Then go out and play your game.