Cerebus: The First Half (1991)
Art by Dave Sim
TRAVIS LAZARCZYK:
(first published at Central Maine, 25 September 2017)
Kneeling during the national anthem is not a crime.
When I was a senior in college, I went to a reading held by writer
Neil Gaiman and writer/artist Dave Sim. Twenty-two and a half years
later, I don’t recall too many details of the event, other than meeting
two men I admire was a thrill, but something each said stuck with me.
Gaiman is British, and Sim is Canadian. In the course of the evening
both urged the audience -- comprised primarily of young Americans -- to
cherish the First Amendment. Neither of their home countries, as free as
they may be, has a First Amendment. Don’t take the First Amendment for
granted, they implored. Embrace it.
I’ve thought about what Gaiman and Sim said quite a bit lately, as
I’ve watched the controversy explode over NFL players kneeling during
the playing of the national anthem prior to games.
Here’s the wonderful thing about the First Amendment. It protects all
the speech you find deplorable. All of it. Nobody gets to decide your
opinion is criminal. As much as some in the government would yearn for
that power, they don’t have it.
In this case, it doesn’t matter if you’re offended by football
players taking a knee during the national anthem. You can respectfully
disagree with them, which is fine, and you can voice your displeasure in
a number of ways. A counter-protest, for example, or simply refusing to
watch or attend NFL games. Hitting anything in the wallet is usually an
attention-grabber.
What you, or I, or most
importantly, the government, cannot do is stop them. Hand-wringing over
kneeling, standing -- or in the case of Buffalo Bills running back LeSean
McCoy, stretching -- during the national anthem takes attention away
from the fact that our country has a lot of real problems that deserve
discussion. By grandstanding on the issue, President Donald Trump pulled
a bait-and-switch on us, turning our attention away from real issues.
He got us to squabble over the minutia while the underlying issues
metastasize.
But somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to politely discuss
anything. Take a minute and scroll through the social media platform of
your choice. I’m willing to bet most of the posts about this topic
involve intolerance of one viewpoint or another, finger-pointing, and a
lot of name-calling. When it comes to talking about anything important,
our society is an abject failure.
I stand for the national anthem, and will continue to do so. If
somebody with different life experiences feels the need to kneel, or
sit, or read a comic book, that’s fine, too. Whether or not kneeling
during the national anthem is disrespectful is a matter of opinion. Even
if you feel kneeling during the anthem is disrespectful, nowhere in the
First Amendment will you find “respectful” as a qualifier to free
speech. You will find “the right of the people to peaceably assemble,”
which is exactly what players who take a knee are doing.
We should be able to talk about the issue like adults. We should be
able to bring differing viewpoints to the discussion, but it’s obvious
we can’t. Somewhere along the line we lost the ability to tolerate
opposing viewpoints and we lost the ability to respect them. For
example, the same fans who claim to hold the national anthem sacred
booed and jeered kneeling New England Patriot players throughout the
anthem’s playing prior to Sunday’s game against the Houston Texans. You
could hear it on the television broadcast. How does booing somebody with
whom you disagree treat the anthem with respect? It’s your right, of
course, but if you’re trying to advance the idea that the playing of the
anthem is a solemn occasion, booing is an ineffective way to show it.
It’s more disrespectful to boo somebody engaged in a peaceful protest
during the anthem than it is to kneel. It’s more disrespectful to riot
rather than let a view that differs from your own be heard, as we’ve
seen on college campuses across the nation.
We need to celebrate the First Amendment, not fight over it. That’s
one of the wonderful things about this country, nobody is standing over
us and forcing us to agree -- or pretend to agree -- with each other. The
miserable flip side of this is we’ve lost the ability to respectfully
disagree. If we talked about the underlying problems that led to
kneeling for the national anthem in the first place, we’d be moving in
the direction of becoming a stronger country. Maybe we’d stop being such
a fragmented one.
