Neon and Kneeling: On Sports, Politics, and When the Lines Get Blurry
Remember those long road trips in the backseat of your parents’ car?
The way the seatbelt started to dig into your neck at just the wrong angle, somewhere when mile 126 turned into mile 127, and you had just finished the 18th chapter of your massive get-me-through-this novel you were reading?
You’d take a pause from whatever sublime escape you had open on your lap, whatever world you’d just been engrossed in, and take a look out the window for a while. What did you see?
What I remember most from those trips are the plains of Nebraska; the way they blurred past my eyes at 65 mph and how the rippling, perfectly rowed corn — unfurled on that prairie land like a green flag 12-feet up the mast — blurred into a water color painting that had run together with a speeding brush. The way it was beautiful and dizzying and difficult for me to fully figure out where we were in relation to what was going on a mere 15 feet off the road, because that distance and that blur made it seem like we were in a rocket ship and this was some new world.
That’s where we are right now at the intersection of sports and politics.
It’s coming fast.
Maybe too fast for some.
Maybe it was already here for others.
It’s dizzying and suddenly blurry and what felt like an entirely different world is suddenly here. We have reached out destination and its time for us to put our tray tables and our seat backs into their full and upright position.
On Friday, the President of the United States of America decided he’d been holding onto his lit fuse long enough, thank you very much, and casually tossed his own personal brand of Molotov Cocktail into the middle of the sports world.
Criticism of players kneeling for the National Anthem is nothing new. We’ve heard diatribes and read think pieces. Seen thoughtful commentary and witnessed fire-breathing 140-character incendiary devices get detonated.
We have heard a lot of who, what, when, where, and how in the past few months and weeks and days.
But, in the midst of this vast, smoking, chasm of a divide that seems so expansive between us, have we been asking “why?”
Have we been asking the men and women kneeling? Asking that same question of ourselves before we turn our torrid, innermost, emotions into the boiling cacophony of keyboard keys?
With the highest profile people, in America’s highest profile sport, taking a breathlessly covered stance on something as uncomfortable as race relations in a nation where, not that long ago, one man could literally own another man — the blood red ink in those bleak chapters that we wish we could just skim through from our nation’s history — it’s hard to not lose sight of the “why.”
And, because those 4 other “W’s” and that one “H” are the neon mechanism being used in this moment to deliver the message, some people are having trouble clearing the haze from their eyes to see what is actually there.
If you do not support the delivery mechanism, please stop for a moment and evaluate the actual delivery itself.
Is there merit there?
Is a man shouting into the canyon of our country’s past only doing it to hear his own echo, or is he hoping — truly hoping — for a landslide. A pile of rock and rubble that, while dangerous and unsubtle at first glance, can actually be scaled and arduously climbed until finally we are in the light of day once more?
If you do not agree with the action to deliver the message, that’s fine.
You disagree with the means? Fine. But what of the ends? What about that “why?” Let’s ask each other that a little more.
Some may kneel.
Some may stand.
But we all should rise.
Together.
