Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I live in Vikings territory so I learned to ignore NFL games years ago, long before players started kneeling to protest the nation that made them rich.

I’m glad to see the general public catching up to me.  NFL ratings are down and I predict they’ll continue to fall as Liberals use the NFL as a platform to scold ordinary Americans for being hateful, racist, deplorable people.  They’re driving away their own customers, killing their own golden goose, and it warms my heart to see it. Shortsightedness should always be rewarded, and brutally.

The protesters are nearly all Black.  They kneel to protest racism in America.  I wonder if those players have any idea how slender the margin separating America today from Perfect Utopia, and how vast the gulf separating opportunities for Blacks to succeed in America versus other nations?

If the protesting players had grown up in any other nation on earth, would they be millionaires?  Would they have had public education, affirmative action, athletic scholarships, personal trainers, agents, coaches, publicists, union representatives . . . all striving to make them into one-percenters?  Some of them might be brilliant men and superb athletes who would succeed in any situation; but all of them?  Seems unlikely.  In other nations, they’d have been subjected to far worse conditions.  And so would the slower, dumber brethren for whom they kneel.  Racism is not unique to America.  But upward mobility for Blacks as a racial minority?  That very nearly is. What are the prospects for Blacks in Finland?  France?  Fiji?

Worse, the protesters can’t seem to understand why anyone would object to their disgraceful conduct during the national anthem.  The coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Tomlin, is himself a Black man who urged his team to have 100% participation.  He’s upset that one player broke ranks, failed to support the team.

Alejandro Villanueva, the Steelers player who stood with his hand over his heart for the national anthem, served three tours in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger where he was awarded a Bronze Star with V (for Valor In Combat) and with oak leaf (meaning he’s been awarded that medal twice).  Villanueva doesn’t have anything to prove to his Black coach or to the Black players on his team.  But they could learn a lot from him.

Joe Doakes

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the inability of many Americans to comprehend, much less respect or tolerate, disagreement is a plague.