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Something More American than Football

How strange it is--
this marriage between religion and sports!

How strange it is that
almost no one thinks it strange
to drive to the high school stadium
to watch the kids play football,
knowing that someone prayed with the team
for . . . well, not that we beat the snot out
of the kids from Left Elbow High School,
but for . . . maybe . . . just a good clean game
with as few injuries as it will take
to beat the snot out of the Left Elbow Bluebonnets.

The game cannot start, of course,
until we sing the national anthem,
or until someone with musical aspirations
sings the national anthem for us.
Everybody hopes that Colin Kaepernick
does not show up and sit through
the rockets red glare, which would
put lives in danger at the suggestion
that racism is still real right here
in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It is as if religion, and sports, and patriotism
were a seamless blend of everything worth believing:
god is on everybody's side--the Left Elbow Bluebonnets
prayed almost exactly the same prayer for
a good clean game and a righteous win--
because that what the Constitution is all about, isn't it?

Nobody--well, almost nobody--bothers to admit
that some people aren't religious:  maybe the halfback.
Some people are religious but not Christian:
maybe the left tackle and the special teams coach.
That maybe football, and basketball, and baseball
have absolutely nothing to do with patriotism
and good citizenship and worthwhile lives.

That praying to Jesus might actually be offensive
to some of the parents or players or bystanders
is almost beyond imagination; about as unimaginable
as suggesting that an imam from the mosque
pray for the righteous drubbing of the Bluebonnets.
Now that would be a liberal suggestion too far, wouldn't it?

I have forgotten:  is it even possible to start a football game
without singing a nearly unsingable national anthem first,
o'er the lan'n'nd of the free'ee!  (gasp) and the home of the brave?
Clap!  Clap!  Whistle!  Clap!  Clap!  Hee-aa-ahh!

American football, or baseball--even Cubs baseball--
or basketball, is not what makes us definitively American.
Our Constitution is what defines us as Americans.
Baseball and apple pie . . . well, maybe football and pizza,
are just things a lot of people like.  They are not requirements
for being American.  Taking a solemn vow to uphold
the Constitution is what makes us American.

Americans may or may not be Christian,
may or may not be religious, at all,
may or may not play, or even like, bone-crushing,
brain-addling, knee-destroying football,
may or may not eat turkey in November,
or set a tree symbolically ablaze in December.

In fact, it might be clarifying to play a basketball game
without a military honor guard or a bomb bursting in air,
sometime, just to clear the air a bit, while doing our best
to remember that not all Americans are Caucasian,
or Christian, or even interested in basketball, but that
they volunteered for military service, even when the war
was probably a huge mistake in the first place,
and when some of the freedom they are fighting for
is actually being denied to them because they aren't
apple pie White, or are the "wrong" gender,
or kneel to something more American than football,
or do not belong to the religion of becoming rich and righteous.

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