STAND up! SIT down! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

All the brouhaha and the fact that it's football season ... I tell ya ... woke up with memories of being a cheerleader way back in my early college days ... and a rousing cheer ringing in the air ... CLOWNS to the LEFT of me! JOKERS to the RIGHT! STAND up! SIT down! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! ...

And in the back of my mind I'm cynically wondering what it is this time that the media doesn't want us to be paying attention to as we take the bait again. It makes me want to watch and listen to that whole speech again, to see what we're being distracted from paying attention to. Or give a gander to quieter things happening (or not) on other kinds of playing fields that we might ought to be focusing on, other types of teams whose behavioral choices we maybe should be examining.

What would we do if half of our favorite football team decided that they just weren't going to play ball? If they refused to budge their butts off the bench and sat there with their arms folded for a whole season? Owners, advertisers, coaches, and fans alike would be slightly irritated I would think, if half of the team just pocketed their pay while riding the bench because they didn't want to do their jobs.

Extrapolate.

Now somebody please explain to me why we're all up in arms about some athletes exercising their 1st amendment rights and we're exercising ours right back at them - while another team hired to play a different kind of game is flat bench-sitting, pocketing their pay while refusing to do their job - and America just lets them ride the bench without so much as a murmur.

Am I the ONLY ONE in this whole entire nation who sees the irony here? We're all freaking out over a couple of minutes of some of our team players being recalcitrant before they go onto the field and do their jobs. At the exact same time we're not making much of a fuss about a much more important team that is sitting out the entire season.