The 2018 National Champion: American Democracy
“With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Like many of you, earlier this week I watched the NCAA College Football Championship (BCS Championship) game. It was with immense pride for the young men who so ably prepared for their big moment and so valiantly represented their respective institutions with the competitive spirit, class and grace that would make any coach or parent gleam.
The stakes of the game were bigger than the match itself and this particular championship represented something much deeper than the numbers on the scoreboard.
It was thrilling to watch Alabama’s Nicholas Lou Saban — arguably the greatest college football coach in history — cement his legacy and witness a young freshman quarterback from Hawaii, Tua Tagovailo, begin to “Roll” a foundation of his own.
A ferocious team of Georgia Bulldogs pushed the boundaries of their abilities and the game clock and can loudly and proudly bark for years to come despite coming up just a few points short.
It was a fun evening of “amateur” sport (the SEC alone made $12 million) and professional entertainment. The guest stars were a racist reality star President and a broad minded real star Poet who so passionately reflect the bi-polarity of a nation searching for fragments of commonality to help mend its beleaguered soul.
The real winner of Monday night’s match was not the Alabama Crimson Tide or ESPN, the game’s broadcaster. Nor was it sponsor and stadium namesake Mercedes-Benz or the NCAA, college sports “governing” body that routinely turns a blind eye to its own hypocrisy and institutional discrimination. The winner was not a grandstanding President Trump or the grand performance by Kendrick Lamar. The true victor on Monday evening was American Democracy.
Democracy proved once again that when the whistle blows and the bright lights turn on, our country always rises to the occasion. The battle scars of our differences are easily outmatched by the healing power of our hope.
Democracy demonstrated that when we huddle together and effectively execute our game plan, it cannot be defeated. Our Union is made stronger by the uniqueness of our varied American experiences and imperfections of our playbook.
Whether on the football field or battle field, Americans proudly honor our heroes and are grateful for the sacrifices that bind us.
Whether standing with hand on heart or kneeling with heart in hand, our Stars and Stripes define who we are and no two states better reflect our nations struggle to become “a more perfect union” than the great states of Alabama and Georgia.
Alabama is America’s civil rights ground zero. It is the birthplace of our greatest civil rights struggles and triumphs. From Rosa Parks’ seminal moment in Montgomery in 1955 to Vivian Malone and James Hood’s attempts to enroll and desegregate the then all-white University of Alabama in 1963.
1963, the same year that white supremacist terrorists (members of the Ku Klux Klan) planted sticks of dynamite and bombed and killed four young African American girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
Alabama is home to “Bloody Sunday”, when on March 7, 1965, several hundred marchers crossed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and were brutally beaten by local and state police. The same bridge where 20,000 people courageously marched weeks later from Selma to Montgomery serving as a critical tipping point for our nation’s landmark Voting Rights Act.
Alabama, the “Cotton State” is the birth place of a civil rights movement that ended over one-hundred years of legal segregation.
A state whose kind hearted and decent citizens reaffirmed the greatness of American democracy by recently voting for and electing Doug Jones to the United States Senate.
The same Doug Jones, who as a former federal prosecutor brought two of the four 16th Street Church bombers and KKK terrorists to justice in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity”.
Georgia is neighbor to and shares an eastern border with Alabama. It is the birthplace of Jackie Robinson and home to two Nobel Peace Prize Winners, Dr. King and President Jimmy Carter.
Atlanta, Georgia, a proud City that an ill-informed and un-empathetic President Trump called “crime infested and in horrible shape.” Atlanta however, is better known as “The City Too Busy to Hate”.
Atlanta is the proud home to civil rights icon, Presidential Medal of Freedom Winner and United States Representative John Lewis. Vice President Mike Pence called Lewis “my friend” and said that Lewis “was an integral part of the American story in our nation’s unrelenting march toward a more perfect union.”
Georgia, home to Clark University, Spelman and Morehouse College, the latter of which graduated Julian Bond who in 1966 was elected yet blocked from being seated as a Georgia State Representative due to his stance on the Vietnam War. Democracy always wins, because Bond then went on to serve four illustrious terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and six more terms in the Georgia State Senate.
Georgia is the epicenter of the student sit-in, the Albany Movement and the Interposition Resolution, which attempted to block and declare the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education null and void. Georgia, the “Peach State”, home to the 1996 Olympics that welcomed nations and flags from all over the globe and whose own flag included an image of the Confederate Battle Flag as recent 2001.
This is the paradox of democracy. It affords us the opportunity to join together on a Monday night in January to root and celebrate our cherished pastime while simultaneously demanding that we agree to disagree, and to try to make sense of our shared and troubled past.
Democracy requires that we listen, advocate, protest, sit-in, march and vote. Democracy gives us voice and allows us to fellowship, to worship and to love without prejudice and without censure. Democracy is hard work because it requires all citizens to sacrifice for the greater good of the American community.
On Monday night the country was united to cheer and to jeer. To stand and to kneel. To clap and to rap. American democracy cannot be defeated when we commit to practicing and executing our game plan. The American playbook is battle tested but each down requires love, kindness, decency and respect.
America’s Championship needs to be vigorously defended or it risks getting crushed by opponents bent on indifference, greed, ignorance and intolerance. Lucky for us — democracy’s season is every moment of every day and its outcome is in our hearts and hands.
