Wrong people on a pedestal

I don’t really care if professional athletes stand for the national Anthem.

To me, they’re late to the game of trying to be role models I appreciate they have political views. We all have them. Very few people care what mine are. I’m not announcing them to the world, and I’m not letting you in on a tiny bit of what I do and trying to put my views on a pedestal.

We’re Democrats. We’re Republicans. We’re everything in between or nothing at all.

I respect everyone’s views, but I also am allowed my own personal opinions. Stand, sit down, kneel…whatever. If you’re watching sports to determine what needs to be changed in America, we’re all in trouble.

Please don’t jump down my throat for not taking a firm stand for or against this. I appreciate the message, but I also have to look at the messenger. Take the NBA for instance: Every game was a political statement, and then it came out that only 20 percent of the players voted in the last election. That’s pitiful.

In the NFL, one of the guys who was telling us he’s going to be standing for the anthem, was accused by multiple women of arranging affairs within months of his high-profile wedding.

These aren’t messengers. They aren’t what America stands for. For the most part, they’re coddled and spoiled and act like teenagers with millions of dollars at their disposal. The extent of what most of them are going to offer to fix our country’s ills was a slogan on the back of their jersey.

America is great and don’t take that as an endorsement of the candidate who uses that term. It’s the best country on earth. I firmly believe that. We have problems that we always need to work on. Our society has made a lot of mistakes over the years.

Obviously a contentious election has made both sides hyper-sensitive. In two months, perhaps we can take a more rational look at America’s ills and work to fix things. The Presidential rhetoric will go away. The riots will cease. Calmer heads can prevail.

This is one of those columns that people on both sides are going to interpret mistakenly.

Go ahead. I’m not going to ask you to stop. A few weeks ago, I was accused within 24 hours of publishing “a Democrat paper” and “being a “Right-Wing nut.” To me, you can’t get more balanced than that.

So, stand or kneel, it’s a shallow display. Stay in the locker room. Who cares? You’re making millions to play a game. It doesn’t pay to get angry either way. The wrong people are being put on a pedestal.