3 Peas in a Pod of Patriotism

The flag. I want to talk about the flag. This time NOT the Confederate battle flag, and where/when should it be flown. But, the other one. The one that matters a lot more than as a historical relic: Old Glory-the tattered one shown here in at a Civil War reenactment at Port Hudson, Louisiana.

The NFL has brought us a new opportunity to reflect on when to stand, or rather, when is it grudgingly okay NOT to stand, during our national anthem, a patriotic tune aptly named The Star Spangled Banner.  Old Glory and the national anthem are really two peas in the same pod of patriotism, so when I say flag, I mean the song too, and I suppose the Pledge of Allegiance is the third pea in that pod of national patriotism.

First and last, I believe patriotism to one’s nation is good, and is absolutely necessary for the health of a nation. But absolute, blind patriotism is a two-edged sword that will grievously wound the wielder. Think Japan and Germany during WW II.

When I was a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout, I attended the National Jamboree at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, a place that rivals any other historic bit of geography as the birthplace of American patriotism. Valley Forge is not a battleground. It’s not a Yorktown or a Gettysburg or a Belleau Woods or a Pearl Harbor. Nor is it a hallowed hall where our Constitution or Declaration of Independence were hammered out.

Valley Forge is where George Washington’s pathetic little Continental Army first wintered and survived while it learned to be an army, to be something more than “a rabble in arms.”  Valley Forge was a school of tough love, and without Valley Forge, we quite literally would still be flying the British flag outside our courthouses.

As President Trump did this past summer, new President Lyndon Johnson spoke at the Boy Scout National Jamboree in 1964 at Valley Forge, and I sat.  I didn’t stand. I didn’t stand because even though LBJ was a fellow Texan, he was also a Democrat, and I grew up in a family of very right-wing Republicans. I hadn’t yet cut loose on my own. I wasn’t yet thinking for myself politically. So, being a teenage jerk whose brain was still clicked off, I sat in protest while those all around me stood and clapped.

I don’t know if my scoutmaster saw me sitting while all others stood when the President of the United States was introduced. But if he did see me, he should have kicked my ass and jerked me up. He should have pulled me up, not because of his personal politics or my parents’ politics, rather because I was an American kid, and because the person who was serving as the President of the United States was being introduced.

We should, we must, honor the president, any president, because the Oval Office defines us a nation. Our national identity comes not so much from the person sitting behind the desk for a short span of years, but the ongoing fact that as a single national voice, we over and over and over elect just one, only one, person to serve as our national leader for four years.

Who we elect is secondary to the fact we continue to elect our president, time after time. We damned well better honor the Oval Office, and teach our children the importance of honoring that office, regardless whose butt is behind the desk.

I’m not through: Six years later, in 1970, I was no longer a young Republican, and I one day found myself among 20,000 other college students marching down Congress Avenue in Austin in protest of the Vietnam War.  I was sort of grown then, yet I honestly don’t know if Walter Cronkite’s news coverage of Vietnam had penetrated my noggin. I was a busy college guy, but I figured it was okay to protest with thousands of others one pretty spring day.

Moreover, I had lost the draft lottery. I had recently sat by myself at a breakfast table in the Student Union and opened the Daily Texan newspaper to find where my birthday had been drawn among the 365 possibilities. Let me assure you, that is one unforgettable way to confront your level of patriotism. I was still enjoying a college deferment from the draft, but looking at my #88 draft number, I knew that when my deferment ended, I would be drafted, and I was NOT about to go to Canada to join those who had fled their own draft notices.

Anyway, was it a sensible contradiction for me to take part in a non-violent protest against the war? The war which I might soon enter wearing a soldier’s uniform?

The answer really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the protest march by thousands in Austin was protected free speech and I suffered no punishment for it--not like so many of the civil rights protesters during the 1960’s, whose cause was indisputable in hindsight.

Flash forward 14 more years from 1970 to 1984. I was the still-green principal of Lockhart High School, and we had weekly pep-rallies for the football team. Almost every week I would notice one or two jerks, usually 14 year-old freshmen, on the top row of the bleachers who were sitting during the national anthem. Then and now, I wished I could have pinged them with a BB gun pellet.

You see where this is going: When it is right and when it is wrong to participate in a symbolic protest towards things that greatly worry us?

We Americans can be cantankerous and contrary in our attitudes about almost anything. In spite of our deep commitment to the First Amendment that protects our right of free speech, we have a national history of sometimes shutting down that right for the greater good--at least the greater good is the reason used.

An early example is the tens of thousands of Americans who remained loyal to England during our Revolution, and were soon afterwards forcibly deported to Canada. Their land, homes, and businesses were lost and their wealth redistributed.

Another: after the Civil War, all Confederate veterans lost their right to serve in public office during the decade of Reconstruction.

A third example: during WW II, thousands of Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to live in detention camps, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

And there were the indignities condoned towards African-Americans during the 100 years after the Civil War ended, under Jim Crow laws and segregation. I won’t even mention the thousands of black men being lynched during those decades.

My point is that for all its importance in holding us together as a nation, patriotism can get out of hand, and when that happens the First Amendment, the right of free speech, is an early casualty.

The current hubbub about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem is complex. Unlike me as a 14 year-old dumbass at Valley Forge, those guys are way too big to pull to their feet, and unlike those ninth grade jerks at pep rallies, the NFL guys wouldn’t feel a BB pellet through their uniform pads and their own muscles.  And they’re not kids like I was.

I confess to a knee jerk reaction to criticize them for disrespecting Old Glory, before I even have a thought about the issue they are trying to address through their kneeling.

On the other hand, assuming the NFL players understand they are perhaps putting their livelihoods at risk, why shouldn’t they take advantage of their own particular mutual bully pulpit to draw attention to an issue?  Especially if it is an issue that much of white America does not view as a societal problem. 

I can’t forget that my parents and grandparents despised the non-violent, non-rioting civil rights protests of the 1960’s. Yet, those marches, sit-ins, speeches, and court-forced school desegregations--a few infamously under the protection of armed National Guardsmen, were necessary. They were sometimes ugly, but they served their purpose of not allowing us to continue turning away from the truth that racial integration was the only right path for America.

Back to today: If our police officers across the nation are indeed prone to using firearms too quickly against blacks when enforcing our laws, that is certainly a proper issue to study and to pro-actively address.

As to sitting or kneeling during the national anthem as a means of symbolic protest about anything, I’ll stand for the right of each American to make his own choice about that, without fear of legal repercussions. I hate the sight of anyone kneeling during our national anthem, but to me, that is free speech. And, that’s how rationally patriotic Americans are framing the discussion. The fringes are shouting nonsense as they usually are, but the vast majority of us are now thinking about why the NFL players are kneeling so conspicuously.

How should the owners of the NFL teams should respond? Well, the teams are their enterprises. They own the logos, the stadiums, the uniforms. They make their own rules, and the players are their employees. In the end, the owners will weigh their own best interests.  We’ll see how it plays out, so to speak.