A turning tide

Hard days now for the Anthem Police. They're running out of sports to watch.

First Colin Kaepernick knelt quietly and then a bunch of other NFL players knelt quietly and the Anthem Police, failing to recognize what they were doing was as American as apple pie, said they'd never watch another NFL game, uh-uh, no way, not on your life.

Then the baseball players wore Black Lives Matters shirts and knelt on Opening Day last week, and there went baseball for the Anthem Police, who insist on making it about the flag or the song or the troops when it's actually about everything the flag represents and the song is about and the troops defend.

Then came last night. And there went pro buckets.

There went pro buckets, because everyone wore Black Lives Matter shirts and everyone knelt, black and white alike, players and coaches and game officials. Opposing coaches linked arms. Even the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, recognizing a groundswell when he saw one, said he understood and waived the NBA's rule about standing for the anthem.

So that's the Big Three of professional sports in this country, and where does the Anthem Police go now? Because you  know the kneeling won't end with them. It will spread. It will happen on the college level and even the high school level in some places, because it is a groundswell and no amount of haranguing or threatening or suspending is going to stop it.

Or any amount of rubber bullets or teargas or totalitarian cosplay ordered up by an increasingly out-of-touch president.

I don't know if that means some unseen tide has turned in this country. I'd like to think so. And it certainly feels so.

It certainly feels so when it's not just blacks, but whites, too, who are out in the streets saying please stop shooting us. When it's not just Black Lives Matter but white suburban housewives and husbands and other just plain folks who are standing up. When three ex-presidents, two Democrat and one Republican, get up to honor a man who shed his blood for the very sort of American rights the out-of-touch president and his equally out-of-touch fellow travelers are working so hard to dismantle.

I don't know if that was a sea change we saw at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta yesterday, or inside the NBA bubble on opening night for the Weird Thrown-Together Summer Thing, aka "the restart." I do know what we saw was true leadership, eloquent and principled, while the alleged leader of the nation gibbered away on Twitter, trying to distract us by floating a preposterous notion about delaying the November election.

Too many folks were far too alarmed by that, given that it's completely impossible for it happen. It was simply a small, insecure man trying to divert our attention from the glaring contrast between him and his betters at Ebenezer Baptist.

And on those basketball floors beneath the bubble. That, too.