Few Americans today are willing to protest much of anything. Who today is stretching the limits of First Amendment rights? If there is an injustice in the country, does anybody care?
Plenty of American are actually concerned about the direction law enforcement is taking in the United States. But they are not particularly interested in doing anything about it. There is the concerned that unarmed black people are getting gunned down by the police. Mostly black folks are concerned about that. But, white people are concerned about civil asset forfeiture and other things that hurt them. There is concern that our intelligence agencies are corrupt. There is some common ground here.
Who out there is impressed with the representation they are getting in Washington? Oh, you say that you actually don’t have any representation? Perhaps the protesters feel the same way.
Folks are concerned about disrespect for the flag and the national anthem. Those symbols represent the people who live in the United State. The flag can’t be good and the people be bad. The respect due the flag is based on the level of respect the people of the country deserve. If the people in the country are immoral and of bad character, the flag doesn’t deserve any respect. When the flag and anthem are disrespected, the people in the country need to look at themselves and ask what they are doing to make our flag and anthem positive icons.
When a society treats every activity as something that requires a collective decision, it is a sickness. Do we need some kind of group effort to make those bad boys stop misbehaving? If we do, then we don’t need a first amendment because in that case it is useless.
Back in 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement came and went. The public rebelled against it. They were concerned about crimes against ordinary people by what is now called the Deep State. The Occupy Wall Street crowd and their detractors had common ground. They didn’t realize it at the time but they did. Today Occupy Wall Street would go over a lot better than it did in 2011.
The surprise is not that NFL players are protesting. The surprise is that no one else is. The injustices they are protesting are only the tip of the iceberg. Freely using First Amendment rights outweighs any negative impact from disrespect shown to our national icons.
In one sense the players are being good role models. If citizens have no representation in government and are shut our of the formal process, we have to expect them to use their First Amendment rights to accomplish their goals in other ways.
The truth is a hard sell. Fantasy Free Economics gains readers one at a time. Major search engines simply do not list blogs which disagree with their political agenda. As long as folks share the link to this blog and others speaking out against the grain, the truth will at least trickle into the public consciousness.
Fantasy Free Economics recommends the following blogs.
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