The whole “NFL takes a knee during the National Anthem” story really wasn’t a big thing to me until the massacre in Vegas. Now I see that there’s more to say. Our fights over the suffering of our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico and Las Vegas are why it’s wrong to take a knee during the National Anthem.

Very little binds us all together as a nation. If it is not a love of country, a patriotism that transcends our differences and retains some awareness of being “one nation under God,” it is nothing. And that is what we have holding us together right now. Nothing. Just the laws, I suppose, and that will not be enough if the nation itself loses its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

Toxic Take the Knee

This is why the take-the-knee thing is so toxic. It says “My grievance is bigger than the country itself. Nothing unites you and me. Our divisions are greater.”

I’m not saying the grievances are unjust. It is to say that disrespecting the country itself is not the way to express it.

The players have a right to free expression. But there’s a proper ordering of it. We all, right and left, protest injustices. We protest them within a fundamental commitment to our nation and therefore to each other. Each one of us looks at our fellow Americans and assume their good will and their belief in the same American values we believe in.

At least we should. A lot of Americans don’t look at each other that way right now.

What would the last week have looked like if we lived in a country where no one would think about taking the knee as our national anthem was played and our flag waved before us? In a country where we fight over politics with the understanding that politics is not the ultimate thing, that the ties that bind us trump the things that divide us? Where we saw each other first as fellow Americans and not political enemies?

What Last Week Would Have Looked Like

We wouldn’t have NFL players taking a knee, for one thing, and the angry debate that’s raged across our country. White Americans would listen seriously to black Americans when they talk about their relations with the police. Black Americans wouldn’t assume that white Americans were racist when they disagreed. Both would believe the other was telling the truth as they see it.

Perhaps those who want to put the mounting disaster in Puerto Rico on President Trump would have acknowledged failures on the part of local government and the local FEMA, rather than putting it on mainland heartlessness. Perhaps those — myself included — who are inclined to view the attacks on Trump as ridiculous could ask ourselves is the President is making the best use of his time.

Maybe all of us could have acknowledged that three major hurricanes, one right after the other, would take a toll, and getting help to an island is tougher than doing it over the highways. Maybe we could have let our guard down, not fear the politics of it, and just helped our countrymen down there.

What would our reaction to Las Vegas have been if love of country had trumped our political differences? Some would not have assumed Antifa did the killing simply because the victims were country music fans. Others would not have blamed anyone who opposes gun control for the deaths.

Americans Being Americans

To have a nation like that would require a people who know that what unites us is greater than what divides us. That would require Americans who know that being American is more important than being a progressive or a conservative.

That would require a country that doesn’t take a knee.