All of us, put another way, need some deep order. Even early Buddhist monks carried the dharma with them. Wandering, with no creed, they would have simply been lost. Having something to hold enabled them to mutate and grow within an ordered internal world.
I have been in fact contemplating the idea in recent days that Judaism’s main accomplishment was creating a stable social organism capable of learning and retaining secular ideas, which became old and wise.
In America, we are a highly diverse people. We offer freedom, and ask very little for it. You can live your life as you see fit. Except in some small towns, nobody cares if you go to church, and we are even willing to tolerate people who call publicly for authoritarian government, as Antifa for example does continually.
Thus, publicly well known people attacking the National Anthem and flag symbolically is not a minor thing. It is one of the only things left that binds us together. It is a ceremony, a ritual, in which we all say symbolically that, our differences notwithstanding, we are all in this together. The differences are very obvious and literal in the case of the fans of two opposing teams sitting intermingled with one another.
That football–or any other player, as this may or may not stop with the NFL–have the RIGHT to publicly shit on their American heritage is unquestioned. Nobody, certainly not me, should be calling for legal sanctions on publicly expressed opinions, no matter how stupid and counter-productive they may be.
But what is the appropriate reaction to someone attempting to spit in your face and missing? That they tried to insult you is clear, and that no concrete, real harm was done is equally clear.
For my part, I don’t even understand what it is they think they are protesting. Should the deaths by homicide of several thousand blacks every year not factor into the equation? Should the fact that even when cops kill people, a lot of the time the cops themselves are black not count?
And what do they want done? To “raise awareness”? How could anyone have failed to see the leftist narratives that have been on continuous display at least since Obama first took office?
What black kids need are good schools, the good jobs that come with them, and intact families. Virtually all criminality comes from kids raised in one parent homes, white, black, and presumably every other race too.
Attacking symbols is attacking deep structure. Americans hold so few things sacred that this point is not obvious. But for fuck’s sake, the Steelers, led by their coach? And again, for what? What is the point? What is the end game? As football players, they are trained to have plans. What is the fucking plan? Piss on the flag, laugh about it, then go about their millionaire lives?
America is a voluntary association. We restrict to some extent who can come here, but we don’t keep anyone here by force. Anyone who doesn’t like it is literally free to leave, which is not the case in North Korea, Cuba, and probably to a great extent China.
As a voluntary association, we don’t make people do things they don’t want to do, but as something which aims at the transcendent, which aims to rectify the countless crimes of history, asking for a little respect is not unreasonable, and publicly denying that respect is in my judgement ample warrant for contempt.