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'The Star-Spangled Banner' should be reserved only for events that matter in life. Let's keep sports in their place.
Eyes will be focused on watching knees right from the jump of the NFL preseason in the annual Hall of Fame game Thursday between the Chicago Bears and the Baltimore Ravens. Television cameras will capture just who is taking a knee and who is not as the national anthem plays. But should Francis Scott Key’s ode to his country even be played before sporting contests?
Sports are entertainment. The national anthem is not played as you enter the museum, sit down at the symphony or stroll into the movie house, which also represent forms of entertainment. Sometimes those forms of entertainment reach the level of art, which can change us profoundly at the level of who we are. That would appear to make them more consequential than what a group of people does with a ball.
But we bow down before sports, and we don’t seem to question why the anthem is played before them at all, which seems almost un-American. We are people who, at our best, peer, probe and ask questions. The flag, for instance, must be treated a certain way, put up at a certain time in the morning, disposed of a certain way, because of what it represents. Values that are sacrosanct. But what of the anthem? Is it cheapened within the context of something that is really a form of distraction?
Playing anthem before game is unnecessary
It’s not like playing the anthem before a game makes people reflect upon the democratic ideals of their country more. They do not reflect upon sacrifices made in wars so that sports could be played any more than they mull over heroic sacrifices when they go to the carnival. Yet it is sports alone, so far as entertainment goes, that is deemed a setting fit for an airing of the anthem.
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What would happen if we dispensed with the anthem before sporting events? It’s not that anyone would view what was going to transpire as less American. After all, we are talking games here, diversions, not recognition of taking out the sniper’s nest on the hill or helping the impoverished or just giving back to one’s community.
And while it’s also not practical to cue up a recording of the anthem as you take your seat at a screening of "A Quiet Place," it’s not equitable that sports should get the anthem treatment alone among forms of entertainment.
Sporting events are a 'privileged diversion'
Its presence should be reserved for matters of greater consequence. Sports are leisure. If you view them, you have decided to spend some of your down time on them. Same as sitting out by the pool, or taking the trip to the microbrewery. Leisure needs no patriotic commendation, and when we kick off a sporting event in the same manner as a graduation ceremony at the Air Force Academy, perspective is lost.
Which is a shame, because the greatest civic duty of sports is their ability to provide perspective. They grant us respite. They take us away for a few hours from the real business of life. They provide contrast for us as they recharge our batteries before we return to what really matters.
Someone might allege that without an anthem to take a knee to, athletes are losing a valuable form of protest. But anyone can take a knee for a minute. The larger message within the anthem itself is the challenge to make the more impactful sacrifice, to use one’s time, energy, platform, to labor on the side of the just.
Play the anthem before the events that actually matter in this life. Not before a privileged diversion. Doing so knocks the equilibrium of our value system out of whack. Life is hard enough as it is, which is why sports is a boon in the first place, and why the anthem should be played somewhere else.
Colin Fleming has written for Harper's, Rolling Stone and Salon, and he's a regular guest on NPR's Weekend Edition.
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