NFL attacking free expression before Memorial Day a bad call
WASHINGTON >> It is, unfortunately, appropriate that the National Football League’s owners decided to issue their new rule attacking free expression the week before Memorial Day.
A holiday dedicated to those who gave their lives for our nation’s freedom has itself been mired in political controversy almost from the beginning. The latest round of posturing and pandering around patriotism should not surprise us.
Samuel Johnson saw patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Let’s qualify that. An honest love of country is a virtue, not a vice. And nothing should sully the honor of the men and women whose sacrifices make it possible for us to speak and worship freely, and to exercise democratic control over our government.
Nonetheless, patriotism often is manipulated in the name of power, advantage and money. And the contested history of Memorial Day is a story not only of innocent local pride but also of political and cultural clashes.
In 1966 Congress granted official recognition as originator of the holiday to Waterloo, New York, which first decorated the graves of Union soldiers on May 5, 1866.
But there are many other claims. A northern abolitionist who traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to organize schools for freed slaves, on May 1, 1865, led a group of black children to a cemetery for Union soldiers “to scatter flowers on their graves.”
Southern women held ceremonies for those who died doing battle for secession called Confederate Memorial Days. The Grand Army of the Republic, the politically influential Union veterans group, generalized honoring those who died to keep the nation together with decoration rites on May 30, 1868. By 1891, every Northern state had established that date as a holiday.
It’s no shock that the holiday’s many subcurrents of regional and racial tension rose to the surface during Obama’s presidency. In 2009, a group of scholars urged him to abandon the practice of sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, he also sent one to the African-American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. It commemorates the service of more than 200,000 people of color who fought for the Union. He was the first president to do so.
In 2010, when Obama chose to honor the war dead in Chicago, his conservative critics intimated he was the only president not to lay a Memorial Day wreath at Arlington, even though Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush had all been elsewhere on Memorial Day at least once during their terms.
So nasty innuendo built around imagined sins against patriotism predates Donald Trump. But Trump’s attacks on NFL players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice represent a particularly vile effort, implying that the dissenting athletes, most of them black, lack patriotism.
The anthem at the heart of this discussion celebrates our country as “the land of the free.” Yet the NFL owners’ action is a blow to freedom. Many on the right have spoken out forcefully for free speech on college campuses. But do they now propose to deny others the liberties they claim for themselves?
Democrats fear a fight will place them on the wrong side of patriotism. But the history of Memorial Day teaches us that our patriotism has long been a matter of necessary struggle.
We should not let the divider in the Oval Office keep us from profound appreciation of our fallen. They perished for “liberty and justice for all.” The living cannot surrender these commitments.