re: SVG Meeting with Pels

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We use sports as an escape from things like politics. When politics gets injected where it doesn’t need to be, it is annoying.

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It may be interpreted by some as simply neutral displays of national unity and respect, but politics has been firmly embedded in American domestic sports for a 100 years now.

The introduction of the national anthem in sporting events during WWI to promote the war effort, when the country was split on participation and sour on the draft. The mandate it be played at every football event during WWII to stoke and promote national loyalty and morale. The increase in flyovers and military pageantry following 9/11 and into the Iraq war, that increased spectacle(occasionally justified by the military as a recruitment tool), the endless “patriotic” rhetoric at such events that launders complex American foreign policy as being about “fighting for freedom and our way of life,” that frames America as uniquely exceptional and reinforces that cultural identity. That’s all politically rooted. That all has political purpose and agency. Even if its marketed as neutral by its purveyors, even if it’s loyal adherents don’t recognize it.

Just because you and others never once questioned, or had the mind to question, the reason and motive for certain iterations and usage of pageantry and idolatry in this nation so as to just see it as “normal, neutral, the default” doesn’t actually make it non-political. And so, I hate to break it to you, but what it amounts to in that context is in fact people choosing what politics they want on display and what ones they don’t. That is unless your position is to do like most other sports in most other countries in the world, and leave out the organized patriotism and chauvinistic displays altogether, and just play the game...