Letter To The NFL on Veterans Day ~ Author Unknown

—-If I have brain cancer, I don’t ask my dentist what I should do.  If my car has a problem, I don’t seek help from a plumber!  Why do you think the public cares what a football player thinks about politics?  If we want to know about football, then depending on the information we seek, we might consult with you, but even a quarterback doesn’t seek advice on playing his position from a defensive tackle!

You seem to have this over inflated view of yourselves, thinking because you enjoy working on such a large scale stage, that somehow your opinion about everything matters.  The NFL realizes the importance of its “image” so it has rules that specify the clothes and insignia you can wear, the language you use, and your “antics” after a touchdown or other “great” play.  But somehow you and your employers don’t seem to care that you disgrace the entire nation and its 320 million people in the eyes of the world by publicly disrespecting this country, its flag, and its anthem!  The taxpaying citizens of this country subsidize your plush work environments, yet you choose to use those venues to openly offend those very citizens.

Do you even understand what the flag of this country means to so many of its citizens before you choose to “take a knee” in protest of this “country” during our national anthem?

You may think because you are paid so much that your job is tough, but you are clueless when it comes to tough.  Let me show you those whose job is really tough.

 

 

You are spoiled babies who stand around and have staff squirt GatorAid in your mouths, sit in front of misting cooling fans when it’s warm, and sit on heated benches when it’s cold.  That’s not “tough” that’s pampered.

You think that you deserve to be paid excessively high salaries, because you play a “dangerous” game where you can incur career ending injuries.  Let me show you career ending injuries!

 

 

You think you that you deserve immediate medical attention and the best medical facilities and doctors when injured. Let me show you what it’s like for those who really need and deserve medical attention.

 

 

 
 You think you have the right to disrespect the flag of the United States, the one our veterans fought for, risked limbs and mental stability to defend, in many cases died for.  Let me show you what our flag means to them, their families and their friends.

 

 

 

 

You believe you are our heroes, when in reality you are nothing but overpaid entertainers, who exist solely for our enjoyment!  Well, your current antics are neither entertaining nor enjoyable, but rather a disgrace to this country, its citizens, all our veterans and their families and the sacrifices they have made to ensure this country remains free.

You choose to openly disgrace this country in the eyes of the rest of the world, yet with all your money, still choose to live here rather than in any other country.

People with even the slightest amount of “Class” will stand and respect our flag.

Where does that put you?

You want to see heroes… here are this countries heroes!

 

 

 

 

You can protest policies, the current government, or anything else you choose, that is your right.  But when you “protest” our flag and anthem, you are insulting the nation we all live in and love, and all those who have served, been injured, or died to keep it free.  There is nothing you can do or say that can make your actions anything more than the arrogance of classless people, who care about themselves more than our country or the freedoms for which our veterans and their families have sacrificed so much, to ensure you have the “right” to speak freely.  Our country is far from perfect, but if you can point to any other country where your freedom and opportunities are better than they are here, then you just might want to move there and show respect for their flag!

*** To all who read this, I would be honored if you repost it. Maybe by reposting this letter the ones who it was written for might read it and straighten their act out … Although I doubt it. 

Thanks to my Brother in Law, David, for sending this to me.

Happy Veterans Day To You Veterans! 

via Woodsterman: Letter To The NFL on Veterans Day ~ Author Unknown

“On Courage” by Robert F. Kennedy

One can only wonder what might have been.  On June 8, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.  I was only fifteen years old at the time and those years were ones of bewilderment for a youth still adjusting to life in the civilian sector (having been an Army brat), life in a new place having moved not long ago, and the usual challenges that go along with being in high school.

Robert Kennedy came to San Jose, Ca. just a couple of months before that fateful day in San Francisco.  He visited Guadalupe Catholic Church and was greeted by a visibly eager and excited crowd of largely Hispanic people of Mexican heritage.  It was a warm day, a typical Day in the South Bay Area.   I stood in line and got up close and personal with the man.  I was fortunate to shake his hand.  His handshake surprised me.  He was nervous.  His hand was shaking.  I don’t remember looking into his eyes or meeting his gaze because the handshake was doing the communicating.  A shaking hand seemed so “out of place” for this teen.  Looking back on it, maybe he had received threats to his life.  Despite that, he was out meeting “the people” and being among them.

But I wonder.  In that state of fear, what did he see, or hear, learn?  The touch of his hand told me that his senses were wrapped up in threat mode and I would be surprised if any man would be able to have the courage to set those feelings aside to truly connect.  I had to admire him none-the-less.  And knowing how things turned out shortly after, it made sense that he knew what he was up against.  But in our society, change agents like him can never be sure of what, where or when a threat will materialize.  What a way to live!  

That is why I admire someone like President Trump.  There are a plethora of enemies out to stop him, remove him, destroy him, one way or another.  However, I think the threats in today’s environment are significantly more distractions than anything else.  By that, I mean I do not think anyone would seriously make an effort to “take out” the President as some senile Democrat Congresswoman recently intimated.  They are self preservation acts aimed at keeping the Left, the Democrat leadership, and those who were part of the last administration protected from law and justice.  While I cry for these criminalsto be brought to justice, treasonous people who have committed high crimes and misdemeanors, maybe people like AG Sessions are protecting the President by not pursuing these modern day villains.  Maybe.  But at some point you have to let loose the dogs of war and cry HAVOC!  People have to pay the price for their actions.  Actions have consequences and as Barry said so eloquently, elections have consequences too!

Read the words of this Statesman Robert F. Kennedy, words written not long ago but words that seem from another age.  Moral courage seems in such short supply from our nation’s leaders.  And those that do stand are viciously attacked as the new mode of  war is character assassination.  One person can make a difference.  One person can influence another.  And so on.  You do not have to be a genius to have value in this world.  You can have strength of character, and a moral compass that guides.  We are all human and we make mistakes.  The compass does not make you perfect but acts as a guide.  So we set our sights on a goal and inevitably we “tack”, to use a nautical term, and make our way ever correcting for the winds and currents that take us off course but always keeping our goal in sight.  Be strong.  Be faithful.  Be courageous.  That is what Robert F. Kennedy told me through that handshake so many years ago. – Mongoose.

*********

“There are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows. But we can perhaps remember- even if only for a time- that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment in life; that they seek- as we do- nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Our answer is to rely on youth- not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. The cruelties of obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. They cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger that come with even the most peaceful progress…

Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’

These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world that yields most painfully to change…

Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.”
– Robert F. Kennedy, in a speech made to youths in South Africa, 1966.

via Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly

Dennis Banks, R.I.P

“And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing.” — Dennis Banks 

Longtime American Indian activist Dennis Banks –

Red Lake Nation News

 By Paul Walsh
Star Tribune

Dennis Banks, a longtime national American Indian activist who was acquitted in the famed 1970s Wounded Knee uprising trial, has died, his family said early Monday. Banks was 80 years old.

“Our father Dennis J. Banks started his journey to the spirit world at 10:10 p.m. on October 29, 2017,” reads a post on Banks’ Facebook page signed by his children and grandchildren.

“As he took his last breaths, [son] Minoh sang him four songs for his journey,” the notice continued. “All the family who were present prayed over him and said our individual goodbyes. Then we proudly sang him the AIM [American Indian Movement] song as his final send off.”

Native News Online, a national website covering American Indian issues, reported Sunday in a dispatch from Rochester that Banks developed pneumonia following open heart surgery 10 days earlier.

“I know there are still many issues out there, many mountains to climb and many rivers to cross,” the news site quotes Banks as saying to friends and family during a recent hospital stay. “I am going to stretch my life out as long as I possibly can, but I won’t be a living vegetable.”

The family said Banks will be buried in his home community of Leech Lake in northern Minnesota with traditional services. Further information about arrangements are pending.

In 1968, Banks was among the founders of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis, an activist movement that spread nationwide. Under Banks’ leadership, marches and takeovers became AIM’s signature tactics for years to come.

Banks participated in the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz, a Bay Area island that had been home to a federal prison. In November 1972, he led AIM in a takeover of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs building in the nation’s capital.

Banks and other AIM members made their biggest mark, though, in 1973, when federal agents clashed with hundreds of protesters occupying Wounded Knee in southwestern South Dakota, the site of an 1890 massacre of Indians by federal troops.

Protesters and federal authorities were locked in a standoff for 71 days. Before it was over, two tribal members were killed and a federal agent seriously wounded. Banks and fellow AIM activist Russell Means were charged in 1974 for their leadership roles in the uprising.

After a trial in federal court in St. Paul that lasted several months, a judge threw out the charges on grounds of government misconduct.

“What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people,” Banks said in explaining the motivation behind Wounded Knee. “That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong.”

Banks also organized the Great Jim Thorpe Longest Run from New York to Los Angeles to demand the 1912 Olympic medals taken from the greatest of American Indian athletes be restored. In 1983, the medals were restored and given to Thorpe’s family.

His autobiography “Ojibwa Warrior,” was published in 2004. A movie about Banks’ life, “A Good Day to Die,” received best documentary honors at the San Francisco American Indian Film Festival in 2010.

Banks, or “Nowa Cumig” in his native language, was born on April 12, 1937, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. At age 5, he was placed at a boarding school in southwestern Minnesota, where he lived until age 17, when he joined the military and served in Japan.

Dennis Banks Passes Oct 29 – Red Lake Nation News

More on Dennis Banks and his life at

Dennis Banks: US civil rights leader who founded the American Indian Movement