The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I guess it’s news worthy to report each and every professional athlete who decides to make a political statement by refusing to stand up for the national anthem. Personally, I’m still trying to figure out what the hell spangled means. Splattered maybe? My handy dictionary sez it’s plastic or metal objects that are shiny. I guess Betsy Ross’s old flags might have had sewed-on plastic stars, but I kinda doubt it. Not that it matters, it’s a song, not a Magna Carta.

When I was a teacher, the school where I taught always played the anthem every morning through the loudspeaker in each classroom. My kids would dutifully rise and put their little hands over their hearts and listen half heartedly to the words, probably no idea they came from the War of 1812. Me, I’d sit at my own desk. The kids didn’t know quite what to think of this treasonous act and were too timid to ask. And I didn’t feel it necessary to give them my reasons. My business, my class. Freedom in America.

When I was a kid myself in Georgia, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and then one of us would read a verse from the Bible. Even as immature as I was, something about this smacked of tyranny. When my turn came to pick a verse, I picked the shortest one in the New Testament: ‘Jesus Wept’. Short and sweet and it always got me a trip to the principal where I was treated like an atheist communist sympathiser. Mr. Crawford would sit me down in the little room outside his office and explain to me, a Yankee intruder in his Confederate fiefdom, that insubordination would not be tolerated. When I tried to explain that I had met the terms of my assignment by reading a Bible verse of my choosing, he glared down at me like I was the grandson of William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who burned a swath through the state in the Civil War, and said ‘You know what I’m talking about here, Little Man.’

Indeed I did. Indeed I do. These folks who won’t stand up for the Star Splattered Banner do too. You think it’s a free country, think again. The herd makes its demands and you pay a price for ignoring them. But like the weekend armchair patriots like to say, freedom isn’t free.

Jesus wept.

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