© 2018 Jim Spence - One of the greatest things about America is the 1st
Amendment. Freedom of speech isn’t hard when people say things you agree with.
In fact, one could argue that we wouldn’t need the 1st Amendment if
we all agreed with one another. I am thankful that for many years now I have
exercised my 1st Amendment rights on this site. I have also enjoyed
thousands of hours of broadcast time on the radio doing sports and political
commentary.
Some people hear celebrities say things they disagree with
and they demand they shut up about their political views. Not me. Celebrities
have the same rights as everyone else. While it is true they often have a
larger forum than the average American citizen, they should be allowed to
expose their ideas to scrutiny if they choose to do so. This is what freedom is
all about. Pop singer Taylor Swift comes to recent mind. I love Taylor Swift’s
music. I have almost every song she ever recorded. However, I did not agree with
her take on the Tennessee Senate race earlier this year.
| Neil Armstrong |
The most noteworthy celebrities to weigh in on politics and
American history are arguably the top two players in the NBA. Stephen Curry and
LeBron James have put their thinking caps on recently in full public view. During
a podcast with former NBA star Vince Carter, Curry asked Carter and his
teammate Andre Iguodala if they believed the United States had ever actually put
men on the moon. Astonishingly, in unison these men, all of whom have made
millions of dollars playing basketball, agreed in tones that assured viewers
they were serious that the answer was no. You have to wonder how grown men who
have become multi-millionaires choose to remain so ignorant.
Curry is in the minor leagues when it comes to saying stupid
things. It was LeBron James who took the cake this week. James, who holds a
high school diploma from St. Vincent – Mary in Akron, Ohio has apparently not
used much of his spare time to study the plight of slaves in America many
generations ago. James had this to say on HBO. "In the NFL they got a
bunch of old white men owning teams, and they got that slave mentality. And
it's like, this is my team. You do what the fuck I tell y'all to do or we get
rid of y'all.”
Ummm, ok.....let’s see. How do we begin with a young man who is
as clueless as LeBron James. For starters, let’s assume James is correct about
NFL owners getting rid of players who don’t follow their coaches’ orders.
Firing players who don’t stick with the game plan is not a slave mentality. We people who own businesses and pay people a salary call this approach, "a performance mentality."
Let’s try to help poor LeBron process this information. Slave
owners didn’t fire slaves for not following orders. Instead, they chained them to posts and beat them with leather whips. If the slaves tried to escape, their owners
would often cut off half a foot. Slaves lived in atrocious shacks and were fed
the lowest grades of foodstuffs. Slave women were abused in ways that are
unimaginable. If you haven’t read author Alex Haley’s “Roots,” you should do so
soon.
It seems doubtful that LeBron James has ever read Roots or studied history. It seems doubtful he knows that 600,000 white men (some of them old) actually died fighting
for the Union in the war that ended slavery. Because James is uneducated and
ignorant, he finds it very easy to take shots at "old white men." Oddly this seems fashionable in 2018. However, James chooses the wrong white guys. NFL owners pay their players (of all races) seventy-seven times the
average salary earned by working Americans ($2.1 million per year versus $26.9
thousand). NFL owners compete with their pocketbooks for athletic talent and pay much
higher salaries for truly great players many of whom are black. Though the last slaves in America have
been dead for many generations, James is too ignorant to know that it is an
insult to the plight of American slaves to compare their horrific status to
that of modern NFL players who enjoy privileges that average working people can only
dream of. It is also an insult to NFL owners to compare them to plantation
owners.
Still, LeBron James is an American. He has a constitutional
right to demonstrate how limited both his cognitive skills and his desire for fundamental
knowledge are. We should all celebrate the fact that in America even the
blessed clueless, sometimes seize the opportunity to make a complete asses of
themselves and provide a few chuckles for all the pathetic old white men he seems to have an issue with.
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