Being reasonable and compromising would be not flipping their shit that someone is exercising their freedom of speech.
Like… when the Left flipped their lids when Brett Favre didn’t stand and applaud long enough for “Caitlin” Jenner?
Cite for “the Left” giving a damn about Brett Farve’s applause of Caitlin Jenner? I’m pretty sure that didn’t rate even a single tweet from the Kenyan Socialist President …
(also - putting quotation marks around Caitlin is a shitty thing to do, as I’m sure you know. )
It has become a tradition at Chicago Black Hawk hockey games, for the spectators to cheer and shout throughout the entire playing of the anthem, literally trying to drown out the organ. Unorthodox response, but certainly not out of keeping with a sense of patriotism and respect.
Not sure why you bothered to ask if you had already decided how you were going to react, but ask you did.
I tend to follow the “When in Rome” model. If the locals stand, so will I - not out of respect for their flag, but out of respect for them. If it’s an anthem I know, like “O Canada”, I may even sing some of it. YMMV.
I notice that the games shown in your link are all football games.
I attend scores of games every year but they’re almost all NHL and AAA Baseball games. Very occasionally at each they’ll have a color guard but at the NHL games the flag is simply hanging from one of the rafters along with the various championship banners and at the baseball games it’s on a pole in center field next to the state flag, city flag, and team flag.
I seem to remember from college where I did attend football games that they’d have a color guard from ROTC so I suspect your claim of “almost every sporting event” is more accurately “almost every football game.” It doesn’t seem to be nearly as ubiquitous at other sports.
Well I was quite clear that I didn’t care and asked a rhetorical question about it surely not applying to foreigners. I was expecting a “no of course not” but I am rather surprised and little creeped out about that quasi-official “flag code”. That right there would be enough to turn me from a “stander” to a “sitter” were I not already the latter.
I think mandated patriotism is an empty gesture and has the whiff of the fascist and the totalitarian about it. about it.
Sigh. Display of the flag during the anthem is specifically covered in the flag code previously linked. As I explained before, I didn’t quote that part previously because it did not explicitly refer to behavior prescribed to foreigners.
Here is where we differ. I see adapting to societal norms when in another country not as patriotism, but as respect for the people and their traditions. I understand your position, I just don’t subscribe to it in this case.
The flag code, by the way, is merely advisory. it carries no weight of law or penalties.
You’re right-it IS stupid. I suspect most people are unaware of where the pledge originated-which was that it was whipped up to encourage public schools to buy flags so they could recite this moronic little piece. Originally, it came with its own Nazi-like salute which someone at least had the sense to drop. I’d like to see the pledge go the way of the dodo bird but that’s unlikely.
This exactly. It’s why I don’t attend my community’s HOA meetings. It began with the HOA board starting the meeting with a prayer, then escalated to the Pledge. I want to say “It’s not a prayer breakfast or a political rally, it’s a business meeting, so get on with it,” but of course, I would be branded as “that guy,” so I just avoid them altogether.
I agree that can be a good reason. It doesn’t necessarily decide the issue (this one or any other) because then we’d never change anything. But respect for tradition is a valid thing IMO. And this is a basic difference between a generally ‘conservative’ and non or anti-conservative view of things, outside more specific partisan politics. People more to the left are more likely to say ‘and don’t tell me it’s because we’ve always done it, that’s a stupid reason’, people more to the right are more likely to think it’s not necessarily a stupid reason. Elements of both though can be subject to reductio ad absurdum arguments (‘so conservative are saying let’s never change anything no matter how bad’, ‘so liberals are saying let’s tear down everything’).
I also do notice on arguments about nationalism how people who think it’s so bad in the US tend not to think anything of it in other countries. Sometimes that’s from exaggerating how much more true it is in the US (the example was given, who thinks not playing the Canadian national anthem at the games of lone Canadian teams in major otherwise-US leagues like MLB and NBA, would be wildly popular in Canada? I don’t think so). They may instead just say ‘that’s none of our business as Americans’, but that kind of undercuts the standard they seem to want in the US that ‘we’re all one world’ so playing up US national identity is divisive. If we’re all one world it is their business to complain about displays or nationalism everywhere else as much as they do about it in the US, but they generally don’t.
Also while it’s true the different countries in the world are to some degree ‘little factions fighting about everything’ that’s also practically how the world is organized now and for the foreseeable future. The UN is light years from being a government. In the real practical world most political decisions are made at a national (or lower level). So it’s much more practically important people in the US feel they reach decisions (what to take away from some people in progressive tax to give to others in subsidies, as just one example) within a group with something in common, a community. Otherwise why should anyone accept sacrifice as part of any public policy, just because ‘we have the votes so tough shit’? That’s is a really poor reason. The defensible reason is ‘because we’re a community, a nation’. So reinforcing that with traditional ceremony, I don’t see how that’s categorically bad.
Nor are major wars now being constantly triggered by blind nationalism, which is anyway much weaker in the US already than it is in almost any country the US would conceivably have a war with. It’s far stronger in places like China and Russia. The idea of constantly bad mouthing your own country, as is popular in a lot of US society now, is not accepted in those countries even by ordinary people, aside from govt suppression.
Not that continuing to play the national anthem (and/or raise the flag) at sports events will heal the US divide, nobody reasonable would say that. Eliminating it though would be one more symbol of growing division if we can’t even have that in common anymore.
Sporting events are entertainment, it adds to the pageantry and perceived importance in an attempt to spur interest in watching.
In most circumstances, you would be on your own. For sporting events, it only happens at international matches, or (possibly, I’m not up to date on this) at the FA Cup Final (where tradition dictated quite a bit of community singing, including Abide With Me, but that I think that’s gone by the board).
It used to be the custom to open or close quite a lot of events like concerts, theatre plays and movie showings with the National Anthem, from the First World War until the 1960s or so. That died out as a custom, particularly since playing it at the end of the final showing in a cinema usually coincided with a mad rush to get to the bar before closing time, or for a bus home. It was a familiar enough joke to be shown happening in something set in 1941.
It does happen for special events, and there are people on the watch to find ways to use it to attack a politician they disapprove of*, but I think most people would think it cheapens the whole point of having a national anthem if it’s used for every ordinary occasion.
*To even up the balance, here’s the then Secetary of State for Wales - an English Tory MP - trying to mime along to the Welsh national anthem in Welsh.
Not to mention TV station sign-offs.
Bingo. It’s a shamelessly crass practice, but it’s the truth.
While I agree it’s stupid, I can’t help it – I’d really miss Jeff Jimerson, the Pittsburgh Penguin’s anthem singer.
Plus every now and then, you get someone who’s REALLY bad, and then it’s entertaining watching the players trying not to laugh.
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down,
never gonna run around or desert you…