They didn’t start playing the national anthem at sporting events regularly until around 1941.
In 1916, President Wilson ordered that “The Star-Spangled Banner” be played at military and other appropriate occasions. There were never any Presidential orders to play it at sporting events. Football, as it appears, has nothing to do with our Military, or anything else to do with the defense of our country at all. This whole business of taking a knee at a football game is rather meaningless when you put our Anthem and our Flag into it’s proper perspective.
The NFL is absolutely “not” a government organization.
The NFL is a private, for profit entertainment venue similar to Seinfeld – How many times did they play the National Anthem before Will and Grace came on? How many times did they play the National Anthem before Gilligan’s Island came on?
See how that works? The NFL is a simple entertainment venue that’s not too unlike the shows mentioned above and has nothing to do with our government or it’s overall national security.
Kneeling before a football game to protest something is just like kneeling to protest something before The Simpsons come on. The eventual outcome of doing each would be the same. Save for the effects of attempted social engineering, it’s all pretty pointless and does absolutely nothing to further the cause of anyone.
Mixing politics with entertainment can only show just how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone.
The NFL has done more to protest America in the past few years than it has ever done to try and eliminate the domestic violence committed by its own players. Players crying about being marginalized, while at the same time being allowed to marginalize someone else with impunity is somewhat of a stretch, don’t you think?
As far as the national anthem is concerned, why not just play it at only government related functions. Doing that might keep these so-called protests away from our entertainment industry, and put the racism argument directly into the middle of the government political arena where it belongs in the first place.
