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Part of me held out a little hope that “woke” was dead when I caught the ad: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” It delivered a clever pushback against those who have been telling us for years what to think and see and say — and calling us racist or some other -ism if we don’t agree. But I knew this ad, despite its millions of views, would not be enough.
I read recently that the National Football League (NFL) is dead set on sticking with woke — as if we’ve ditched Jesse Jackson’s “keep hope alive” for “keep woke alive.” All 32 teams must stencil one of the following four “social justice” messages into their end zones: “End Racism,” “Choose Love,” “Inspire Change” and “Stop Hate.” “It Takes All of Us” will be the message in the opposing end zone.
Do you remember the NFL of the 1980s? The pure dominance of the Joe Montana-led 49ers? The sweetness of the Bears’ Walter Payton and the wildness of Jim McMahon? Lawrence Taylor flying around the corner for the Giants? And Bo Jackson carrying the Boz into the end zone on Monday night in front of millions?
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Could you tell me any of the players’ politics? Likely not. Sports was sports and we watched to be inspired by the great athleticism that most of us could only dream of. Yet that greatness lit a fire under our butts, making us hustle harder day to day, to be the best we could be.
Jump to the 2010s. There was a lot of great football to remember. But it was tarnished by the meaningless kneeling protests led by Colin Kaepernick of the 49ers and others. They turned press conferences into referendums on policing, and they weren’t shy about promoting the claim that cops were killing Black people every day. They jammed politics everywhere in the league and it spilled over to other sports.
The low point came in 2021, when Kaepernick made that abomination of a show for Netflix, “Colin in Black and White,” in which he equated the NFL Draft with slavery. The hypocrisy was unfathomable.
Here was a multi-million-dollar quarterback who grew up in the California suburbs, dressed up in a faux Black power suit with a ridiculous Afro, telling us that football was modern-day slavery. I’ve never seen any White person insult my ancestors more than this biracial man.
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Then George Floyd was killed, and the issue blew up. The NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, took a knee and apologized for not taking charlatans like Kaepernick more seriously. The NFL committed millions of dollars in the name of Floyd to address systemic racism.
How else are we supposed to take it other than that the NFL believes the American police are racist and that we, the American people, are also racist?
But where is the straight truth in this mess?
That is why the NFL’s latest virtue signaling is ridiculous. It was born out of lies. We Americans have had enough of this gaslighting and it is time for us to return to the purity of sports.
The NFL was one of the best at that and if it can return to that greatness — where Americans of all colors compete on the gridiron of merit — it will do far more to advance the good within our society. It sure will do far more than any bumper-sticker slogan.
We have the worst case of virtue-signaling fatigue. It’s time to scrap this elitist message for the timeless, smash-mouth football watched by the common man — the blue-collar fans who live on the ground, treating their fellow men and women with respect.
They are the heart of this game.
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