‘ TAKE A KNEE’
The fanged beast Deadline has come shambling around the corner again, and the talk around the world’s water cooler is all about anthem protests in the National Football League. I would like to talk about these protests, and, as always, you can’t stop me, but I have the problem that I already wrote a column I liked about national anthems, essentially exclaiming at how bizarre they are and how we accept their role — an awkward patriotic imposition experienced by most people only at sporting events — without challenge or cross-examination.
Well, I suppose that is all over. Colin Kaepernick’s protest- meme has us all thinking about the foundations and logic of national symbols, and it hurts our heads. But should it?
Where I grew up, in the boreal wilds of Alberta, I went to school with a few strict Jehovah’s Witness children who were somehow subtly ushered out of sight on the rare occasions when the Canadian anthem had to be played. JWs regard, and are not alone among Christians in regarding, national flags as false idols. They know the word for “national anthem” in many languages is just the word for “hymn.” They have a strong conscientious objection to the ritualized performance of patriotic songs.
And one has to say that the Witnesses have a logical — and not just theological — point. (Although the theological argument, given the Old Testament’s attitude to idolatry and Christ’s cautious disdain for man- made law, seems pretty strong too.) An atheist sending his children to a public school could reasonably arrive at a Witness-like discomfort with worship- like behaviour directed at icons or representations of the state. Heck, if I had kids, that is the “faith” I would probably be raising them in.
In retrospect, I have to commend the Sturgeon School Division’s expert handling of a religious minority. We would now call this “religious accommodation,” but I don’t think we had this phrase in the 1980s. It wasn’t an industry with manuals and established technical lore yet. I imagine some bright superintendent just became aware of the problem, perhaps long before my time, and thought through the necessary procedures. The JW children were allowed to be exempt from anthem performances without having attention called to their disappearance. It was something you had to notice. Discussion was averted.
Our schools were near an important air base, and we always had a large quantity of Air Force and parachute-brigade brats mixed in with various varieties of countercultural Christianity. In retrospect, the potential for conflict and bullying over patriotic display seems high — although our soldiers and airmen had not been at war for a long time, and were easy to regard socially as slightly glamorous tech- nicians, rather than saints. In any case, I do not think there were any outbursts of strife. ( You could not, in general, have identified the JW kids by their everyday conduct: it was much easier to spot, say, the Mormons among us.)
When I l ook at the current American environment of cont rived alignment- display and savage explicit polarization, the arranged social peace of my childhood seems like a lost world. When a Jehovah’s Witness or other Christian opts out of a civil- military ceremony, or refuses to stand for a national flag, this is an unabashedly radical action: the implied chal- lenge to the supremacy of the state, and to the legitimacy of its symbols, is thorough. Protests against American racism, or against the particular person who is currently President of the republic, have a more limited character.
They are, as I think most of the people making these gestures would admit, a (serious) complaint or a ( desperate) plea for attention rather than a fundamental challenge to American principles or the legitimacy of the United States. This is, of course, part of the problem: the flag has been dragged, a little opportunistically, into a struggle of partisan, even polemical character.
Like the bank robber who goes where the money is, the protesters are going where the attention is. Many seem to insist that the protest has nothing to do with the flag (or the anthem) per se. Well, if that is true, did you consider making your gesture during the halftime show, or the postgame interview?
But if an American who has weird political or theological ideas — a communist, an Erastian, whatever — cannot participate on equal terms in the National Football League, the USA is not the country I imagine it to be. I do not see an answer to those who point out that the actual form of the Kaepernickian protests is as unobtrusive, respectful and unobjectionable as can possibly be imagined.
Anthems came up as an issue in Canada when one dude decided to write topical new lyrics for ours. Have any of the NFL’s protesters done anything as unwise or selfabsorbed as this? Have any of the hundreds of them injured or defaced a U. S. flag? Does kneeling during a national anthem in any way interrupt or insult or compromise it? If not, what the hell is all the fuss about?
DID YOU CONSIDER MAKING YOUR GESTURE DURING THE HALFTIME SHOW?