A Time To Stand and a Time to Kneel

In the mid-80’s, a real estate mogul named Donald Trump purchased the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League and took a vocal position among owners of the upstart professional football league. His intention was to get the spring league in its second season to compete directly with the NFL by moving it to the fall.

Unfortunately, for him, the NFL and the TV networks kept that transition from being a profitable one, and Trump responded by doing what he is known for doing. He sued. This time, he actually won. The jury, however, didn’t reward him with the $1.2 billion he requested and instead gave him a dollar. Yes, you read that right. A dollar.

The USFL folded and was never heard from again. Trump, on the other hand, has managed to keep his name in the news for decades since, and he actually convinced just enough voters to cast a vote for him in the presidential election to win despite his long-standing history of not quite living up to his promises or anyone’s expectations.

Knowing that his disdain for the NFL dates back over 30 years, it was no surprise this past week when he took the very unusual path of encouraging NFL owners to fire or suspend any “son of a bitch” who knelt during the national anthem. It was clearly pandering to a base of supporters who don’t understand laws or diplomacy and who certainly lack understanding of what social inequality truly is.

The response from the NFL was swift and not in his favor. The NFL front office offered support for the free speech of the players. Numerous owners – some of whom had donated up to a million dollars toward his campaign – took a firm stance in support of their players as well. Trump ended up looking like, well, Trump.

This wasn’t the first time Trump took shots at an industry and got more feedback than he may have wanted. But this time, he has put his supporters in a position they can’t argue. He is asking them to support a piece of cloth and a song over constitutional freedoms. He has put his supporters in a position that they now have to argue that symbols of freedoms are more important than actual freedoms and actual lives.


A lot of people don’t understand the issues surrounding the national anthem controversy, and in some cases they probably wouldn’t support it even if they did. When Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem last season, his hope was that it would spark a conversation about the shootings of innocent black men by law enforcement officials throughout our nation. He accomplished that, mostly thanks to a sitting U.S. President speaking publicly about it last week.

Nobody can say for sure if we will make progress with social inequality in the next few years or even in the next few decades, but it does seem as if we have an executive in charge of our country who is tone deaf to this issue. He described white nationalists as “fine people” while taking shots at those who were merely expressing their right to protest.

You can get upset that people are “disrespecting” the flag by not participating in a tradition that has been around for a while. However, it is a routine that is not required by law, and people seem to be losing sight of that. People who don’t stand for the national anthem are not breaking any laws.

Our military men and women are fighting for our freedoms and most certainly our lives, which are far more important than the cloth and tunes that are symbolic of those freedoms and lives. As a country, we need to join together and focus on what is truly important and stop allowing the rhetoric of the ignorant dictate the direction of this nation.