If you ask me it’s the fault of those damn do-gooders who can never leave well enough alone. Every time we get the country running along nicely, they decide it needs improving. They some group that they say is getting screwed by the status quo. Show me a system that doesn’t screw some existing group or other and I’ll get you a lifetime pass to Madison Square Garden. So they go and tinker with it, and that invariably makes it worse.

You can go back as far as you want in world history, even as far as the Garden of Eden, but in America I think the best example was the Civil War. We had a pretty solid country before that. Everybody knew the rules. Blacks did the work, whites made the money and the laws and judges knew which side their bread was buttered on. Politicians respected what the people wanted. King Cotton was bringing in the bucks from overseas and the planters’ wives were starting to explore dress styles in Paris. The only complainers were nut cases like John Brown. Troublemakers.

Take Harper’s Ferry : we settled John Brown’s hash, but by then the do-gooders were onto Jim Crow, and they started mining it for all they were worth. It was worth 620,000 soldiers’ lives before they were through, and what they started still ain’t over. All that to cater to a minority of slaves who didn’t even have enough education to understand that they were oppressed. We wound up educating them, and what did it get us? Or them?

Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that Kaepernick’s taking of a knee is in the same class as Fort Sumter, but sit back and think about it. The football industry was rocking along pretty solidly on the basis of its accepted myths. Colleges offered the inducement of a free degree to the suckers who suffered concussions getting banged around on the Astroturf-covered concrete of the gridirons every fall. The NCAA, supported by the dues paid by the pro team owners, enforced the rules of ‘amateurism’, to make sure that the suckers got no part of the TV and clothing revenues, or the ticket sales, or the TV contracts. All the money went to the extravagant salaries the college presidents had to pay to attract quality coaches and the bonuses they paid to the lobbyists who were required to ensure that their fancy arenas were financed by taxpayer funds and not by the institutions themselves. Everything was running smoothly. Nobody wanted to rock the boat.

Then along came Kaepernick, and suddenly our guaranteed weekend entertainment (and vacation from politics) was in jeopardy. Now we had to think about brain damage, fake degrees that everyone knew represented mastery of such scholarly subjects as ‘Canoeing’ and ‘Aspects of Athletic Training’, and we had to consider who was going to pay for the health care of all those used-up punch-drunk gladiators. This from late August to February — almost half the year — and you can bet it will spill over in some form to baseball and basketball, the other major escapist windows for those not yet ready to turn to porn.

Do-gooders! Why can’t they take a minute to consider the results before they just go down on one knee ‘to express solidarity’? Solidarity with whom? With what? If this is all about Black Lives Matter and fixing the system that killed Trayvon Martin and assured George Zimmerman that he was going to get no more than a slap on the wrist, why not go after that system directly? Don’t interfere with my one chance at the end of the week to just enjoy myself without thinking about whether four years will be enough time for Donald to completely destroy the country or whether we will see through him in time?

Have we lost our minds? Football should be sacred!