Kids football teams kneel for National Anthem.

[47of74]

A kids football team decided to kneel for the national anthem last Sunday.

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The Junior Comanches' coach Orlando "Doc" Gooden tells the local paper that many of the boys asked him about the protests in St. Louis related to the verdict in the trial of former police officer Jason Stockley. Stockley, who is white, was acquitted in the 2011 death of a black man who was fatally shot following a high-speed chase.

Gooden said after a discussion, the teammates, with their parents' approval, decided to organize the protest gesture.

And in Seattle an entire high school football team kneeled before a game;

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The entire Garfield High School football team, including the coaches, took a knee during the national anthem Friday night before their game against West Seattle High on Friday night to protest “social injustices.”

After the game, which Garfield won, Garfield High School head football coach Joey Thomas said that "the players decided to do this" to bring attention to "social injustices," emphasizing that it was "a player-driven" move and that his players plan to continue the practice during the anthem before every game "until they tell us to stop."

Seattle Public Schools issued the following statement:  “Students kneeling during the national anthem are expressing their rights protected by the First Amendment. Seattle Public Schools supports all students' right to free speech.”

Awaiting the various expressions of reich wing fuck-stickery from various Republicans all butt hurt because these kids decided to express themselves as is their right while the anthem was being played.  

[infooverload]

I wonder if eventually the National anthem will not be played before sporting events? Does anyone know how the anthem ended up being played before sporting events in the USA? My son plays extreme flag football at the moment and we watched him play a double header last week and the National anthem wasn't played, granted several games were happening at once since you only use half the field, but I honestly didn't even miss the whole anthem thing. I don't know it seems our nationalism needs to be evaluated. We need to ask what activities best serve as the best model of patriotism.

[CelticGoddess]

On September 21, 2017 at 3:28 PM, 47of74 said:

A kids football team decided to kneel for the national anthem last Sunday.

And in Seattle an entire high school football team kneeled before a game;

Awaiting the various expressions of reich wing fuck-stickery from various Republicans all butt hurt because these kids decided to express themselves as is their right while the anthem was being played.  

Some have gone ballistic.  Sean Hannity went off on them

Somehow, I doubt this would be an issue had it been Tim Tebow who knelt during the anthem.  They would have been all over it like it was the greatest thing ever.  

 

[PennySycamore]

Kudos for those young people!

I have to post to my sister's FB in support of those players who knelt during the national anthem.

 

[nvmbr02]

On 9/22/2017 at 6:08 AM, infooverload said:

Does anyone know how the anthem ended up being played before sporting events in the USA? 

I just read an article about this in the Washington Post.

Spoiler

As far as history remembers, the “Star-Spangled Banner” was first sung at a professional ballgame 99 years before President Trump demanded that football players be fired for defying the tradition — which has always been a bit of a rowdy one, really.

The tradition began before the National Football League even existed, and long before a 19th-century war song became our national anthem.

It began in Chicago, in 1918, in the seventh inning of a particularly depressing Cubs game.

Two out of three seats at Comiskey Park would have been empty for the team’s first World Series faceoff with the Boston Red Sox, as the New York Times reported. And the 10,000 or so fans who showed up weren’t much in the mood for cheering, for “the mind of the baseball fan was on the war.”

Baseball, moreover, had a PR problem, as The Washington Post noted many years later. World War I had killed tens of thousands of American soldiers, far from the lush green grass on which those players played.

Also, as ESPN later noted, someone had bombed the Chicago Federal Building one day earlier.

Play ball.

“Although the Cubs festooned the park in as much red, white and blue as possible, the glum crowd in the stands for Game 1 remained nearly silent,” ESPN wrote.

Until the seventh-inning stretch, that is, when fans rose to stretch their legs and — for whatever reason — the military band struck up an old ditty about “bombs bursting in air” and so forth.

The Red Sox third baseman, a Navy man, “immediately faced the flag and snapped to attention with a military salute,” ESPN wrote. Other players did likewise, and in the bleachers, hands hit hearts as the crowd sang along and finally exploded in applause — “far different from any incident that ever occurred in the history of baseball,” the Times reported.

The tradition quickly spread across the league, and it had made its way into other sports by the time “The Star-Spangled Banner” was adopted as the official national anthem in 1931.

“The playing of the national anthem should be as much a part of every game as the kickoff,” NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden told the Times at the conclusion of World War II, as he invited President Harry Truman to attend a Washington Redskins game.

“We must not drop it simply because the war is over,” Layden said. “We should never forget what it stands for.”

The country took the commissioner’s advice, more or less. But exactly what the anthem stands for has been the subject of much dispute on many a playing field.

Early on, some attempted to uncouple the anthem from the game.

Repeating the spectacle too often “tends to cheapen the song and lessen the thrill of response,” Baltimore Orioles general manager Arthur Ehlers said in 1954, when he decided to stop playing it before each game, according to Marc Ferris’s book, “Star-Spangled Banner.”

“Within a month, Ehlers relented,” Ferris wrote.

Likewise, the Chicago White Sox attempted to swap out the notoriously hard-to-sing anthem out for the more crowd-friendly “God Bless America” in the 1960s — but incurred the wrath of what Ferris described as “militant patriots” who thought the substitution insulted troops fighting in the Vietnam War.

And woe to the celebrity who botched the sacred singing in decades to come, as Roseanne Barr discovered in 1990, and poor Christina Aguilera in the 21st century.

As the tradition solidified on ballparks and football fields across the country, even slight variations in the anthem’s rendition “became tantamount to an act of treason,” the Washington Star once wrote, according to Ferris.

But Trump doesn’t seem to be a stickler in that regard. He tweeted his delight in 2013, when, after the Boston Marathon bombing, the Bruins’ professional anthem singer stopped mid-lyric before a hockey game and let the crowd finish the song, which it rendered with gusto, including whistles and cheers.

Rather, Trump is upset by the latest incarnation of something that has become as much a sporting tradition as the anthem itself: its subversion by athletes with a point to make.

“The Star-Spangled Banner achieved even greater significance in the 1970s, when pregame ceremonies grew from quaint, utilitarian rituals into spectacles,” Ferris wrote. Like the song itself, these displays were often militaristic, as we were recently reminded when the Pentagon was revealed to be paying for patriotic displays at professional games.

Back at the tail end of the civil rights movement, all this anthem pageantry began to rankle some athletes, who thought it glossed over racial injustices in U.S. society.

The most infamous protest took place not on an American playing field, but at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, at an awards ceremony attended by two black American sprinters: Tommie Smith and John Carlos. As the anthem began to play, both men turned their backs on the flag and raised gloved fists as the crowd booed and screamed the lyrics — until, Carlos later wrote, “it seemed less a national anthem than a barbaric call to arms.”

Both sprinters were ordered to leave the stadium and then suspended from the team — but subsequently became immortal for their dissenting silence in the face of our national song.

Seeking to avert a repeat of the Olympics protest on his football fields, Ferris wrote in his book, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle ordered the same year that players “hold their helmets in their left hands and salute the flag during the anthem.”

Inevitably, that command inspired defiance. David Meggyesy, a linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals and known opponent of the Vietnam War, bowed his head instead when the song struck up and did not salute.

A lonely protester at the time, Meggyesy was benched the next year and left football.

But the old linebacker exclaimed “thank you, thank you, thank you” half a century later, after the San Francisco 49ers quarterback took a knee during the anthem and inspired many to do the same — an American tradition of ballgames, anthems and dissent, which not even the president has been able to stop.

 

 

[mango_fandango]

The anthem being played before games does seem to be a peculiarly American thing. It never happens here unless it's an international game/Olympics. Usually it's God Save the Queen but for some reason it's Jerusalem for the English cricket team. England does not have it's own anthem separate from GStQ (the British one); Wales and Scotland do (Land of my Fathers and Flower of Scotland respectively). Northern Ireland tends to use God Save the Queen although their unofficial song is something called Danny Boy. 

[unsafetydancer]

@mango_fandango England use Jerusalem for the Commonwealth Games too. I think a lot of anti monarchy folks want to see it sung all the time.

[PennySycamore]

My sister had posted some shit on FB the other day about Pat Tillman probably would not have been one of the people kneeling.  I know Tillman's family gets angry when the right wing tries to exploit his death in Iraq as he was not at all a right-winger.  Anyway, I had to defend the rights of the athletes to exercise their constitutional rights to free speech and free expression.  Sometimes it doesn't pay to check my sister's FB.

[SnazzyNazzy]

My 8th grader told me Saturday, that he and about half of his class took a knee during the pledge of allegiance. Considering that they are all 8th graders, I figure they just did it, because the NFL did it (considering we live in deep pro-Trump land). Thankfully my kid isn't an idiot (go me), and actually knew why they took a knee.

That said, I told him to cut it out, because he was going to get suspended (with the whole disrupting the class loophole in the student handbook).

[Toothfairy]

The national anthem is racist as he'll. I can't believe people care more about the anthem than a life. Good for these kids. 

[Shadoewolf]

Half of the HS varsity football team here took a knee at their last game, as did the entire cheerleading squad,  Oldest wolfie included. Her paternal grandparents were outraged. I could not have been more proud.

[RosyDaisy]

My niece did the same. She got flack for it, but she's a Daisy woman. Daisy women stand up for what's right and don't give a rat's ass what other people think. I'm proud of her and love her to death!

[47of74]

Ugh.  I think I want to move out of Iowa once I'm done with school.

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"For these words to be used towards our son, a young man who is attempting to do what he feels is right and how America is supposed to be, shows how far we have regressed."

Darryl Moore of Tiffin wrote that on Facebook Friday evening after someone used the social media application Snapchat to disparage his son, a Clear Creek-Amana receiver named Darius Moore, for kneeling during the National Anthem a week prior. 

The Snapchat post was brought to the attention of Darryl following CCA's game against Marion. In it, someone that evening had taken a picture of Darius, who is black and Native American, and circled him in red. Below, this message: "kick this f***ing n***er off the football team like honestly who the f*** kneels for the national anthem."

Darryl said his son had taken a knee during the anthem before a game at West Deleware, last Friday. He wasn't visible, as the team was behind the field during the ceremony. Darius was planning on kneeling again during Friday's game against Marion but didn't get the chance. The anthem was only played during the freshman skirmish.