I haven’t been following the Colin Kaepernick controversy
because it involves things about which I don’t particularly care: football and
nationalism.
However, recently a friend of mine posted on social media
that people should be free to protest, but that they ought not protest at work. I happen to agree with that
statement (ethically speaking, of course, not legally), but it made me realize
something profoundly odd about the Kaepernick controversy, which is that people
have taken the singing of the national anthem as the default. That is, wherever
you are and whatever you’re doing, if you hear the national anthem, you’re supposed
to stop everything, put your hand on your
heart, and sing.
This is weird. Catholics don’t even feel this way about the
Nicene Creed. This default-to-respect-the-national-anthem mentality is more a profoundly
religious behavior than some of the most significant religious convictions out
there. The only thing that I can compare it to in my mind is the almost
obsessive way some Muslims insist on saying “peace be upon him” any time anyone
makes mention of their prophet. Like, you can’t just mention him if you’re a
Muslim, you have to immediately also say, “Peace be upon him” or “Alhamdulillah”
or something.
I’m not criticizing it, it’s just a fact. The convention is
that the prophet is so holy that the mere mention
of him requires that we pay a small verbal piece of respect to him. I cite this
as a comparison because there is no real equivalent in the West for such
behavior. We can mention Jesus, Abraham, Buddha, or anyone else without
immediately verbally genuflecting, because that’s our convention, that’s our
social norm. We can even say “god” without having to immediately praise him. We
in the West have never had anything quite like “PBUH” and similar statements
that exist in Islam.
…At least, we haven’t had any such equivalent until now.
Now, the US national anthem serves a similar purpose. As soon as you hear it, stop everything and pay your respects!
Anything less is either blatant disrespect, or a protest of some kind.
It should go without saying that mindlessly reacting to a patriotic song is not the same thing as being patriotic. That is, a person’s
hand over their heart is intended to be an action that merely represents or demonstrates patriotism. It is not patriotism itself. To use a
silly example, George Washington was an American patriot long before the national
anthem even existed. A person could do many patriot things and dedicate herself
to civic duty and patriotic service, and still opt out of standing for the
national anthem. Such a person would still be patriotic. It’s not standing for the national anthem that
makes one patriotic, it’s expressing
patriotism some way or another.
Likewise, many people do absolutely nothing for the country
they live in, and yet stand for the national anthem nonetheless. Are they
patriots? Not unless the one thing that determines a person’s patriotism is standing for the national anthem.
Ironically, this will probably be very easy for my Muslim readers to
understand. They know full well that, for example, putting on a hijab doesn’t
make a person modest or dedicated to god. The hijab is just a way to outwardly
express what is presumably true within their hearts and minds, as far as
dedication to god is concerned. So many people have written criticisms of women
who live quite wildly in their youth, and then suddenly decide to put on a
hijab when they’re ready to settle down and find a good husband. Are such people
“truly modest,” or “truly dedicated” to god? Of course not. They might even be
hypocrites. But the point is clear: it’s not the act of wearing a hat that makes
you a dedicated Muslim. The hijab is just a hat, really. It’s not the hat that
makes the Muslim, it’s the religious conviction. The hat just represents all
that.
This implies that the national anthem is just a song. That’s
all it is, it’s a song. To be sure, it’s a patriotic song. It’s a song sung on
occasions on which we wish to express a devotion to our country. But that’s all
it is. Standing and singing a song doesn’t make you a patriot. Nor does sitting
during the national anthem make you disrespectful to your country. There is way
more to it than that.
As time goes on, though, people are becoming less and less
capable of differentiating between symbols and the objects they symbolize. In
many Muslim communities, all anyone cares about is the outward demonstration of
piety – but real piety doesn’t really
matter. As long as a woman is wearing a hijab, the community deems her pious;
the rest is ignored. And similarly, as long as Kaepernick was standing for the
national anthem, nobody cared. The minute he chose to actually think about the
state of his country and make a conscious decision to affect change for the
better was the moment everyone deemed him insufficiently patriotic.
It’s just a song!
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