After months of kneeling over the national anthem — and in protest of supposed targeted police brutality against blacks — football’s finest in on-field showboating have finally found a new cause: offensiveness at their team owner’s remarks.
The possibilities of this type of protesting — and by this type, it’s meant, fabricated and fake — are endless, it seems.
Houston Texans, upset because team owner Bob McNair had remarked to fellow NFL top brass that “we can’t have the inmates running the prison,” by and large bent the knee during their weekend game. McNair had apologized to his team — but apparently, that wasn’t good enough.
“I know they were upset,” McNair said to the Houston Chronicle, after he had met with his team to apologize for his choice of phrase. “I told them if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t use that expression.”
Why, because too many of the NFL’s own have spent time in jail and the remark is a little too close for comfort?
Either way, too little, too late. McNair’s apology fell on deaf ears. A majority of the team knelt during the playing of the national anthem on Sunday. But just to keep it straight, it was their team owner’s comments they were protesting, not police brutality against blacks.
Or maybe, it was a mixture — maybe some of the players were protesting both police brutality and team owner comments. Or get this: Maybe some were secretly protesting something else, too — a little sneak protest thrown into the display.
Wouldn’t that be a gotcha moment for the fans? Here we all are thinking players are protesting racism and social injustice — and then wham, gotcha, no, no Nelly, turns out players are actually protesting the lack of orange Gatorade on the sidelines.
Good one guys.
Gotta keep the fans on edge, after all.
But the thing is: The anthem protests were never rooted in realism in the first place. Police just aren’t out there randomly targeting black people to shoot to kill. Police aren’t searching for their next minority take-down. They don’t carry little black books of the black people they’ve shot. They don’t notch their belts with their most recent gun-down scores.
So taking knees to protest police injustice? Well, that’s the beauty of the players’ politicking. It makes about as much sense to protest the national anthem as to protest team owner’s remarks as to protest supplies of Gatorade. They’re all fabricated, fanciful, fake offenses.
First appeared at The Washington Times.
