Op-Ed: The National Anthem Asks Us a Question - What Is the Answer in 2023?
I was raised to be a patriot!
My grandfather often would tell me, “Your family fought in the Revolution, on both sides of the Civil War, and in World War II,” so the Fourth of July was always celebrated with much reverence.
And when the national anthem played, nothing short of a tornado or the second coming of Jesus could stop you from removing your hat and putting your hand over your heart.
As we celebrate our 247th year of independence from a tyrannical government, have we lived up to the ideals that the anthem declares? Can we answer the question the anthem asks?
I began to wonder how many times we hear this song. I started my research with sports leagues.
The NFL has 272 regular season games and 49 pre-season games. Add 13 playoff games, and we have 334 times the song is played every year in the NFL.
MLB is more difficult. There are 2,430 games in the regular season. The number of playoff games varies, but if there are roughly 42 games in the post-season, that means the question is asked about 2,472 times in baseball.
Now add the NBA and NHL, minor league baseball, women’s professional sports, college and high school, NASCAR and Little League. It is easy to say the anthem is played tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times every year.
This song asks each one of us to examine our legacy as patriots.
Do we realize that Francis Scott Key asked every generation the same question?
It is found in the very last two lines… “O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
How do we answer that?
We see cancel culture, a two-tier justice system, attacks on children and families, investigation after investigation, antifa and open borders, to begin with.
Do we still live in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Let each one of us honestly answer that question this year.
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