National anthem doesn’t belong only to military

Many Americans have a hard time understanding why athletes like San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick would sit or kneel during the national anthem. How could they do such a thing? How could coddled athletes show such disrespect?

One answer may be in how Americans see their anthem. To many of us, it speaks broadly of a great country — one that invented modern democracy and endeavors in its imperfect way to promote freedom, justice and equality. The anthem, like the flag, belongs to all.

To others, the anthem may have a more limited meaning. To watch sporting events these days, particularly Kaepernick’s NFL, is to see an almost singular focus on the military and police.

As recently as the 1990s, when the anthem was played before a game, I can remember turning to a flag flying over the end zone. Today, the flag at an NFL game is almost always marched in by a military honor guard, and military flyovers after the anthem are much more common.

Also common in my experience are tributes to members of the military and police in pregame and halftime ceremonies. (In November, a Senate committee revealed that the Pentagon paid various sports teams at least $6.8 million for some of these tributes.) Not so common are ceremonies in which the NFL trotted out, say, an award-winning teacher.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise then that Kaepernick and others would pick the anthem as a vehicle for protesting police brutality. They don’t see it so much as a national anthem as a police and military anthem.

This view was reflected in a conversation I had with some younger colleagues about the flag and anthem. When I argued that they reflected the achievements of Martin Luther King as much as the bravery of military and police officers, I got a lot of blank looks.

This says to me that it’s time to dial back the military and police overtones. While The Star-Span

gled Banner may have more of a military theme than other anthems (though not France’s), it should be understood that it has meaning beyond the relentlessly adulatory pageantry of the NFL and other leagues.

Americans are a diverse lot who show their patriotism in many ways. Some put on a uniform. Others eschew well-paying careers to enter public service professions in education, health care and social work.

Many of the bravest never marched into combat, but did march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 in Alabama to demand justice for all Americans. Many of the people who made America great, and its symbols worth standing for, made their contributions far from the battlefield or the crime scene — in courtrooms, in schoolhouses, in boardrooms, in laboratories and on shop floors.

Making it clearer that the national anthem stands for those Americans just as much as for our uniformed defenders is vital to promoting a broader patriotism. Who knows, it might even persuade Kaepernick to get up.