Kneelers

When I was a kid,  Sunday mornings were not a time to watch TV.  There were only two or three channels, all local,  and all of them showed someone preaching.  I thought back to that yesterday while looking in on NFL football.  People watching NFL games or ESPN were treated  first to the preening and  self-righteous posturing  of  players kneeling or otherwise showing their contempt for the country during the playing of the national anthem at the start of the games and then to a string of homilies from the people in  the networks  praising  their glory.  Both the players’  actions and the encomia to them were silly and trivial, but sometimes one can learn something from the silly and trivial.

The first thing worth noticing is the fairly gross display of ignorance about free speech and the First Amendment from   players,  owners of the teams, and some people in the media.  The first Amendment protects the right of free speech and expression from  actions of governments – the only organizations that can impose censorship.  It does not prevent an employer from requiring  standards of behavior from employees while they are on the job and representing the employer.  (Such requirement do not infringe on  the right of free speech. If a person does not like a particular boss’s stupid rules, he can go work somewhere else.)   Neither does it  grant immunity from criticism and ridicule.  Just as person A is free  to express his opinions, person B is free to express his evaluation of them and of person A for holding them. 

 No one in government has  threatened the kneelers with punishment or reprisals of any sort or stopped or attempted to stop them.  Trump (who should have kept his mouth shut or expressed his disapproval differently on this one) merely said they are wrong, and their bosses should fire them for behaving that way on the job. He did not send out armed federal agents to disrupt their protests. As far as we know, he has not sicced the IRS onto opponents  because of their views. (That was the Obama administration.)  He certainly has not tacitly supported violent mob “resistance”  to stifle dissent.  (That was the local Democratic authorities in various cities and campuses around the country. )  There simply is no known issue of the right of free speech or the First Amendment in this stuff.

Rather there is a matter of taste, propriety, and, of course, political bias.  It is quite reasonable for Americans who like their country and its principles to be offended by spoiled, pampered,  arrogant, self-righteous,  and often hugely ignorant  entertainers thumbing their noses at that country at events they are paying to watch or attend.  There is nothing wrong with such an offended  person telling the kneelers and their bosses something like “if you don’t like my country, I won’t like giving you my time or money”.   In some respects it would serve them right. 

The political bias from the media is obvious.  Imagine that instead of kneeling in support of opinions  favored by the Democratic Party and  leftists,  some players in 2016 had  knelt sporting Make America Great hats, and  after criticism from Obama, their teammates had joined them  in gestures of solidarity.   It is likely the sermons on that Sunday would have taken on a different tone. 

What We Worry?

Many Americans  seem to be worrying more about  politics lately than is  necessary or healthy.  There are things to pay attention to and difficulties and threats  to deal with, but there is no crisis in the country.  It is not 1858 or 1940 or 1979.   Yet people  are worked up or even obsessed, some seemingly to the point of panic or mania.   

I think electing Trump was a bad idea, but in the context of 2016 electing Mrs. Clinton would have been a worse one,  given the great need to end or reverse the harmful policies and trends of the Obama years (something at which Trump and his people have done a fairly good job). Four more years of  Obama’s policies and practices  might have led to a crisis. However there are reasonable arguments for the opposite opinion on the election, and there are people I respect who hold it. Neither Trump nor Clinton  was a good choice, but having to choose between two bad  candidates is far from unusual.  It happens more often than not, and we have had ample evidence from both parties at various times in the last hundred years that even a very bad president cannot ruin the country.

Some of Trump’s supporters are totalitarian  neo-Nazis,  racist white supremacists, common thugs, and anti-Semitic bigots whose views are inimical to a free society. Some of the Democrats’ supporters are totalitarian Communist neo-Stalinists, racist black nationalists, common thugs, and anti-Semitic bigots whose views are inimical to a free society.  However such people are an insignificant minority in each case.  They should be stopped and punished when they turn violent, but they should not be imagined to be  something more powerful than they are. They are mosquitos to swat when appropriate, not wolves at  the door.

The speaker of the house is a shifty weasel. The minority leader is a mendacious ignoramus. The leaders of both parties in the senate are walking caricatures, but that too is far from unusual.  We are considering professional politicians here,  and people should keep that in mind when forming expectations.  It is not clear that  our present bunch of congress people  is much if any worse than the historical average.  

People in the traditional media favor the left and give  those in their audience a  steady flow of false or exaggerated scare stories about Trump and the Republicans, but that is nothing new.  It has been going on since at least  the  Goldwater campaign of 1964, and there is good  reason not to take it all that seriously.  Gloomy conservative  journalists and  talking heads fret over America’s supposed  moral decay and warn of impending doom in the manner of the collapse of the Roman Republic or even the fall of the Roman Empire to scare those in their audience, but  that is nothing new. It has been going on since at least the 1920s, and there is good reason not to take it all that seriously.  

So I hope people can acquire some perspective and relax at least a bit. Frightened and overly agitated people tend to make poor decisions and can be suckers for demagogues.    It is not time to follow fully the example of Alfred E. Newman, but a little of his approach (or better, an informed variation on it)  might  be a good thing just now for some people as a counterweight to Chicken Little’s.