The opening day of the football season has, for many people, been one of the hinges of the calendar. Once upon a time, it ushered in refreshing months of churned mud and cooling weather, of warm (sometimes heated) gatherings of friends to watch games indoors after the summer. The first games of early September had their place in the charm of seasonal change that blesses temperate climes.
This year, the National Football League has acquiesced in sacrificing its distinctness and will instead become part of the lamentable and ubiquitous culture of political exhibitionism. Falling into line with professional baseball and basketball, the NFL has agreed to ornament its playing fields and uniforms with virtue-signaling graffiti about race relations.
Stenciled slogans in end zones are to shout, “End racism” and “It takes all of us.” Players will wear jerseys emblazoned not with their names, if they choose, but with “Stop Hate,” “Black Lives Matter,” and other demands for a changed society. Before games, we’ll hear the song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is arrogantly touted as the black national anthem, and TV viewers will also be asked to endure propaganda in the form of stories about police brutality and racial injustice.
We’ll see. Players will bend the knee, but I suspect millions of fans will refuse to do so. They will vote with their remotes and, with sad resignation, turn elsewhere. The fluctuating audience for NFL games, already more than 1 million lower than it was five years ago, will surely dwindle further despite a widespread yearning for pleasant diversions during our COVID-19 seclusion.
Everyone has a breaking point, and people are reaching it. Almost all people agree that black lives are just as important as anyone else’s, but most do not subscribe to Black Lives Matter’s Marxist push for social revolution — for example, to treat looting as a form of reparations and to undermine traditional family structures, the collapse of which is central to the misery of the black underclass.
Given that more than two-thirds of players are black, it was hard for the NFL to resist the trend. And going with the flow was probably inevitable also because our culture has become saturated in political ostentation. It is the air we breathe. Is there a neighborhood left where people do not parade their beliefs?
As we venture outdoors on our walks, we are bombarded with slogans of varying fatuity. Nearby yard signs direct me to understand that “white supremacy is terrorism” and that (in Spanish, English, and Arabic) “no matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor.” One wonders whether the proprietors of the latter would extend their inclusive sentiment to a supporter of President Trump who arrived from Texas and who, like them, boasted his beliefs from his expensive patch of front lawn in the D.C. suburbs. Peeking out from overgrown late-summer greenery, many signs declare, “Hate has no home here,” but that’s not the impression one gets from political debate at any level.
Some people have so much virtue to signal that their graffiti read like the Nicene Creed of left-liberalism: “WE BELIEVE,” intones one, that “Black Lives Matter, love is love, feminism is for everyone, no human is illegal, science is real, be kind to all.” One could mention that BLM doesn’t object to the half of black lives taken by abortionists or that science is also real in recognizing a distinct human life in the unborn. Science also contradicts many other articles of left-wing faith, such as that genetically modified foods are dangerous rather than lifesavers on a massive scale and that much sound climate science contradicts fashionable alarmism.
The ubiquity of such signs affirms the grim reality that we engage in political combat always and everywhere. It manifests the Marxist idea that all life is about politics, rather than the conservative one that politics is about some but not all aspects of life.
Has there ever been a time of such showy political tribalism? We reflexively proclaim, shout, and parade beliefs that set us apart from one another, where once we were proud of the fundamental ideas that united us. From Pennsylvania Avenue to the football field, and from there to our neighborhoods, people are splitting asunder according not to ideas that they are prepared to regard as mere opinions but treat as imperative demands that others must accept as fundamental and incontrovertible truths. It does not bode well.
