Well, I won't be watching National Football League action, that's for sure.
It's all because the owners of the league's 32 clubs have decided to ban kneeling during the singing/playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Players must now stand during Francis Scott Key's claim to fame...or risk getting fined.
The only other option for the NFL's athletes: Stay in the locker room until the song's finished.
I remember all the letters that appeared in the Omaha World-Herald during the 2017 NFL campaign...letters that asked those protesting football players to air their grievances "on their own time" rather than in front of stadiums full of people (as well as in front of millions of TV viewers).
Well, those Americans who gave their newspapers such letters have now gotten what they've been on their own knees begging for.
And it probably won't take long before some of those same letter writers attack any NFL players who actually use "their own time" to address issues such as police brutality.
In time for last Wednesday's Washington Post, Shaun R. Harper (a professor at USC who runs the school's Race and Equity Center) turned in a heck of an editorial about the circuit's new kneeling ban.
Harper talked about how the new edict is all about ethnicity.
Out of over 1,700 NFL players who suited up last season, 70% are Black. Seven of the teams had African Americans as their head coaches.
Every last squad in the league is owned by White people.
And starting with head honcho Roger Goodell, most of the people who make up the power structure at NFL headquarters in New York City are Caucasian Americans.
Add it all up.
Harper did just that, talking about how the kneeling ban signals that the team owners don't give a good, good hoot about fighting racism in America. In addition, he stated that "the league is only interested in Black men as laborers and entertainers, not as citizens with the right to use their influence to awaken our nation's racial consciousness, disrupt racism, and improve circumstances for members of their communities who are harmed by racist policies and practices."
The key word is "citizens."
Later on in that editorial, Harper (he's written a dozen books; his most famous one: "Scandals in College Sports") called on NFL players to sue the league over its efforts to hold back gridders' freedom of expression (we're talking First Amendment rights, you know!).
SRH also talked about how he joined many other African-American football lovers in boycotting last year's NFL contests to show solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and other activist players.
Shaun, I'm a year late to the "party," but here I am.
I'll continue to read about the games in the paper and online.
I just won't watch the games on TV anymore...until the Jerry Joneses and Daniel Snyders lift that stupid kneeling ban and stop cozying up to a man who wanted one of those NFL teams earlier in this decade.
That's right...Donald John Trump.
Even if Trump and his enablers/supporters don't really get it, patriotism involves more than standing at attention when you hear, as George Carlin put it, the world's only national anthem that mentions rockets and bombs.
Much more.
Earlier this month, I went looking in the site www.dailykos.com and found out about a 13-year-old North Carolinian named Madison Kimrey.
This Daily Kos article introduced her as the girl who wrote a letter to Phyllis Schlafly, the woman most responsible for preventing the Equal Rights Amendment from becoming the law of the land.
She took the hypocritical Schlafly to school. (The St. Louis native got her law degree in 1950...only to spend the last 64-and-counting years discouraging subsequent generations of young women from going for their own dreams. In fact, the only dream Schlafly wants for any woman is to Get That Man. That's all.)
I first heard about Schlafly during the late 1970s, the time of the last big 20th-Century push to get enough states to ratify the amendment. That hatemonger (okay, conservative activist) made my skin crawl back then and made my blood boil at the time...and still does these things to me.
Schlafly and her colleagues spent so darned much time spreading their brand of lies (such as: "If the ERA passes, we're gonna have unisex toilets from now on!") that it made many Americans' heads spin.
To sum it all up, in her letter, Kimrey stated that the whole point of the modern feminist movement has been to empower girls and women to make their own life choices to be anything they want to be...and that Schlafly and Co. have no business shoving their right-wing agenda down any woman's (or man's, for that matter) throat.
It's all about moving the country forward together...and, as Kimrey likes to say, "Not one step backward!"
The antics of North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and his fellow Republicans in the Tar Heel State's GOP-yoked legislature are a real collective case in point.
Efforts by McCrory and his Raleigh teammates to cripple most North Carolinians' right to vote- and to make health care much less acessible over there- are the big reasons for NC progressives to get together for Moral Mondays...and Kimrey's been one of the big cogs in those Moral Monday protests.
She's right: "If it can happen back home (in North Carolina), it can happen anywhere."
And that's where the rest of us come in.
Madison Kimrey is urging the rest of us to pay attention to the antics of Republican lawmakers (especially at the state and national levels)...and fight those efforts of GOP figures to take America all the way back to...anywhere from the 1610s to, at best, the early 1950s.
You REALLY believe that Charles Koch, David Koch, Karl Rove, and their fellow cheerleaders on so-called talk radio as well as the hosts on Fox Gossip (oops...I mean Fox News) Channel care about America's rank-and-file citizens? You REALLY think the lawmakers they praise have our backs?
Think a darned 'gain.
Kimrey absolutely proves that you don't have to be an adult to get concerned about (let alone involved in) United States politics, regardless of level.
If you think this teenager should just go back to playing with her dolls and leave this work for the adults, you just don't get it.
Aren't you tired of (mainly GOP) lawmakers' efforts to take longstanding issues and continue to kick them down the road for the next generation(s) to solve?
Aren't you aware that, at the same time, those same (especially Republican) lawmakers are teaching their trainees to avoid working on fixing these longstanding issues...and teaching them to kick these issues down the road, too?
Madison gets it.
A couple of weeks ago, I started following her blog, http://functionalhumanbeing.blogspot.com.
And I'm proud to be one of her followers.
