Is the Silent Majority Ready to Blow? by Larry C Johnson

I am riffing off a line spoken by the great actor, Samuel L. Jackson (who happens to be black), to express what I and many other average Americans of the caucasian persuasion feel--We Are Ready to Blow.

In the movie, Pulp Fiction, Jackson's character, JULES, is forced to clean up the gory aftermath of an accidental head shot, and is justifiably angry that he is being saddled with scooping up brains and skull pieces because his brain dead partner, John Travolta, ignored the fundamental rules of gun safety:

Jules: Oh, oh, you ready to blow?
Vincent: Yeah, I'm ready to blow.
Jules: Well, I'm a mushroom cloud-laying mother****er, mother****er! Every time my fingers touch brain, I'm Superfly T.N.T.! I'm the The Guns of the Navarone! In fact, what the **** am I doing in the back?! You're the mother****er who should be on brain detail! We're ****ing switching! I'm washing the windows and you're picking up this ****'s skull!

The cause of my outrage is not an accidental shooting in a movie. My beef is with professional athletes, their team owners and the corporations furiously milking profits from seemingly unwitting, stupid American consumers who are denigrated as racist rubes who must repent of sins they have never committed.

To all professional athletes, black and white, here is an important announcement--the  "white" Americans who bought tickets to watch you play and plunked down thousand for sports merchandise in the past are fed up and ready to blow. We are fed up with those of you parroting the Black Lives Matter propaganda. We are sick of you accusing the police of being racist, while many of you wind up on the wrong side of the law for beating up women, driving drunk and using illegal drugs. As you willingly embrace the damnable lie that America is a racist society founded on white privilege, you want me and people like me to just shut up, buy tickets, watch you play a game and then patronize the businesses that facilitate your performance. If we are such despicable racists why did we cheer your physical achievements or seek to shake your hand or get your autograph? A true racist would not want to have any contact with you. But you ignore that fact and then, in the ultimate irony, berate me and rest of the caucasian nation just because of the color of our skin. And that is enjoying "white privilege?"

The majority of America is still ethnically caucasian, but that label covers a variety ethnic and national groups. The Irish and the English, for example, may have ruddy white skin but they spent a good part of the last 400 years killing each other. White skin didn't matter, religion did.

And you seem surprised that most of the fans who fill the stands at your games are white. If race was really the deciding factor, why would white folks want to attend your games. True racists cannot stand the sight of black athletes outperforming their white team mates.

This recent turn to racially politicize professional sports really saddens me in light of my experience growing up as a fanatic of the Kansas City Chiefs. I was only 12 when they lost the very first Super Bowl, though they broke my heart I was proud of the team. I especially cheered Willie Lanier, Buck Buchanan, Otis Taylor, Ernie Ladd, Mike Garrett and Fred Williamson because of their incredible talent. The fact that they were black men was not something I even considered for a moment as I embraced them as boyhood heroes. It was only later that I learned of the genius and humanity of Hank Stram in assembling a team filled with so many talented African American athletes. Many in the NFL thought Stram was crazy for putting Willie Lanier as his middle linebacker and quarterback of the defense. That was a position that only "smart" people aka "whites" could play. Hall of Famer Lanier exploded that myth as he blasted running backs and disrupted offenses. But I never thought it was odd that we had Willie. I just thought it a blessing.

But today's young athletes were not even born when that lesson could have been learned. Despite being drafted to play in professional leagues, many of these black jocks have decided to push the victimhood agenda and wag a finger of condemnation at white people who have the audacity to support their particular team. You want to sing a Black National Anthem before a football game? You want a song based on the color of someone's skin. Would you be okay if I come up with a White National Anthem? Of course not. That is idiocy and racist. Yet the NFL now wants to use a song strictly based on race. The irony of their own racism escapes them.

The arena of professional sports was supposed to be politics free. Fearsome linebackers like Willie Lanier and Dick Butkus were judged by their ability to separate a runner from a ball with a devastating tackle. Skin color did not matter. But that was then. Now you, along with the morons running your leagues (stupid white guys I might add), want to enforce a collective guilt on white fans just because of the color of our skin. 

Go pound sand. I am done with catering to clueless, self-important millionaires who expect me, and others like me, to spend our time and money in worshipping or celebrating your physical skills. No more.

But I do not think I am alone. The re-start of the sports season for baseball, basketball and football may reveal that there are fewer caucasian fans who are willing to plunk down thousands of dollars for tickets and merchandise just to watch your pathetic, pampered ass play a game. When entertainment requires the spectator to self-abase and be insulted the event ceases to be entertaining or enjoyable.

Last season I subscribed to the NFL Red Zone, which gives the viewer to watch every scoring play in the NFL. Done. Cancelled. NFL and MLB apps on my SmartPhone? Gone. I no longer care who is in the starting lineup of whatever team. And I am not alone. I have friend who is a Philadelphia Eagles fan; he dumped his season tickets, which had been in his family since the team played at Connie Mack Stadium in the 1950s. The same story with my brother-in-law, who inherited the tickets his Dad bought to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1964.

If you think you have a secure future for collecting  hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars in salary while spitting on America, kneeling to insult the nation, and labeling all so-called "white" people as racists, you are as deluded and clueless as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary thought it okay to insult white Americans who supported Trump:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable

And to think I once thought this was a smart lady.

Barack Obama also proved he was fully down with racial stereotyping when talking about working class voters: 

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. . . And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Just wait till Americans see the full body camera videos of the arrest and detention of George Floyd. They will learn that they were lied to about what actually happened and completely fooled into believing that out of control cops eager to punish an innocent black man were responsible for his death. They will learn that the principal officer involved in the arrest also was a black man and that he conducted himself fully and entirely according to the policy and procedures outlined in the Minneapolis Police Department's manual. He did what he was trained to do. 

And then there will be the clear evidence that George Floyd suffered respiratory arrest because of the fentanyl he took and not police abuse. But no one wanted to wait to get those facts on the table. Instead, the leftist mobs and the pliant media combined to sell a lie to the American public and the world. The ensuing violence and looting had nothing to do with building pressure for encouraging police reform. It was all a pretext for trying to destroy the heart and soul of America.

There is a backlash building. A majority of Americans, black, white and latino, are not self-hating masochists. Their silence up to this point in tolerating or enduring repeated insults by professional athletes and their corporate enablers has been mistaken as a tacit admission of guilt. It is no such thing. There is a saying in Spanish--confunden ser bueno con ser un tonto, i.e. they confuse being good with being a fool. Staying silent and being polite are not signs of foolishness nor stupidity. Being constantly hectored as racists is beyond insulting, and me and other proud Americans of European heritage are not going to be bullied or coerced into mouthing meaningless, politically correct mantras.

Keep shoving that crap in our face and you will discover, as voiced by the eloquent Sam Jackson, "I'm a mushroom cloud-laying mother****er."

 

Comments

[Oilman2]

I divorced my self from professional sports decades ago, and I have zero regrets. Watching others play knowing many of them are roided up never sat well with me after I played college ball. Watching faculty give athletic morons passing grades and special 'retests' on exams made me puke. Watching the booster clubs gift those same athletes with corvettes or other great things never made me feel much other than nausea for how crooked the system was - and this was in the late 1970's!

Everyone is seeing many of these pros for what they are - ignorant, uneducated narcissists. The only really American thing to do is just say no...

[Fred]

If you think these pampered millionaires have struck a nerve by proclaiming to the world that they are victims of a ruthless capitalist system of oppression that did nothing to help them get where they are and that everyone who came before was an evil racist supremecist you're probably on to something. I notice you left out the NBA; of course they get most of their revenue from China, kind of like Disney and much of Hollywood. Which is why the news arm owned by that company never points out that slave labor is being used to make much of the paraphernalia promoted to sports fans. Trump should impose an extra 'slavery surcharge' on all of that, or just make them certify it as 'slave labor free'.

[BillWade]

Larry, you can add in Hollywood for me, thanks. If this virus has taught me anything, it's to do more swimming and less watching.

[AK]

Larry and anyone else who's interested,

I highly suggest following the NHL. The league has thus far largely declined to "go for woke." I believe the fact that the players are drawn from a transcontinental talent pool helps it resist the nonsense that the other pro leagues have succumbed to. Russians, Czechs, Swedes, and Finns are here to play hockey. They know their roles as entertainers to the masses, regardless of political affiliation. The American and Canadian players tend to be intensely patriotic to their respective countries as well.

And the product? It's only the best game on earth. I challenge anyone to show me a sport that requires a greater combination of athletic ability and physical grit, self-sacrifice for the good of the team, and collective coordinated effort on the part of teammates. In no other sport would a man block a 90-mph vulcanized rubber projectile with his face, lose half his teeth, get 16 stitches, and only miss 10 minutes of play. The Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy to win in all of sports. It's a grueling, two-month gauntlet, during which teams beat the living s*** out of each other for seven games, line up and shake hands at the end of it, and the winner moves on to do it all over against another team. This happens AFTER 82 games of gladiator-like competition in a regular season. One of my favorite things to do after the season is to check the injury reports from the teams to see what these guys played through on their way to the Cup. Basically, if you can breathe, you play. Broken ribs, wired-shut jaws, shattered ankles... they play. Because it's the Cup.

The players are by and large class-act athletes too, despite the brutality of the game, and you will almost never hear a guy boast of his own abilities even after posting a career-best or record-setting performance. You give credit to your teammates first and always, because you're a hockey guy, and hockey guys are good guys. Everyone should get familiar with what the defending Cup champs, the St. Louis Blues, did during their 2019 Cup run for a little girl named Layla who was battling cancer. If it doesn't bring a tear to your eye seeing her lift the Cup on the ice with the team, then you don't have a soul.

I gave up on the rest of American sports a long time ago, and that includes college. There's nothing like hockey. Pure sport, pure entertainment, and always worth the price of admission.

[Eric Newhill]

Larry,
I think you're 100% correct. I also think there is much more adding to the building pressure in the cooker. Just a few more of many examples would be the release of criminals from prison, no bail and instant release for all manor of crimes, calls to defund police while violent crime goes up, the constant threat of losing one's employment for wrong-think, the damn covid masks and other BS. Many people are not stupid and see this for what it is. Gun stores are sold out. I got the last ammo can of 5.56mm ball available in my area. My order for extra magazines is on hold until the factory can make more. Sales to first time gun buyers are through the roof. We watch the nightly riots and savagery on the news. Who is going to surrender to that. The alternative? Well, I think the gun + ammo sales speak to what many are thinking.

I watch pro bull riding, thoroughbred horse racing, boxing and some NHL. Those sports are unspoiled thus far aside from the best of the horse racing being cancelled. Those are sports for real men, not some pampered egomaniac idiots or Chinese.

[Bill H]

Watching New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees asserting that while coaches and management could be suspended for paying bounties to players for deliberately injuring opponents, but that the players who took the money and committed the injuries could not be disciplined made me an enemy of that team for as long as he plays. I cheered every time they lost a game.

Watching the teammates of Shawne Merriman refuse to say a negative word against him after his third DUI which was accompanied by a steroid rage, because "we have to support our teammate," soured me forever on my local team. For ten years I have cheered every game the Chargers have lost.

I was with you in cheering for the Chiefs. I bought season tickets to the new Arrowhead Stadium two years before it was opened. Willy Lanier was my favorite player ever. It never occurred to me that the color of his skin mattered.

[Diana Croissant]

Thanks, Larry.

I am not Black, and I have never been a professional sports fan. I did enjoy high school sports when I was in high school. It wasn't tainted by money, just home-town pride. I can still feel the pride I felt when my home-town team took a state baskeball chanpionship my senior yar. We had no star players. We had a group of boys who were good friends of us and of their teammates. We could honelstly say we won that chanpionship becaue of TEAMWORK. No player was paid or recruited. They were just good friends of each other. No one tried to be the star player.

As for the taking the knee to the national anthem, I'm going to blame that on school districs all across the country. I was teaching when it became the norm for public schools either to stop asking students to stand and say the "Pledge of Allegiance" or to allow those who did not want to stand and say it to remain seated.

I can't tell you how much that angered me. I always stood and said it and stared at each one who did not stand and say it--looking at each one of them one at a time.

I am the proud grandchild of Germans from Russia immigrants. They were called "Dirty Russians" and were often paid less than the law required for their stoop work thinning beets in the fields becaue they could not read English to learn how much they were supposed to be paid. They had escaped the Bolsheviks who stole their farms for the failed communist experiements in factory farming and communal farming. They endured the prejudice with dignity and with a determination that they would work hard so their children and grandchildren could enjoy the freedoms of the USA. I have the photos of my grandparents on my mom's and my dad's side as they obtained their citizenshp.

I know my ethnic group or racial heritage did not come out of slavery, but neither did my families' ethnic groups have many thousands of white young men fighting and dying to abolish slavery and thus allow expslaves and their descendants to obtain citizenship.

I know that the Blacks did have to fight hard to grasp those freedoms. But I also know that many caucasian people fought alongside them to do that.

Why aren't the Blacks in the cities like Chicago and Milwauki and New York, for example, working hard to get rid of the leadership in those cities that do nothing really to improve conditions for the Black minorities in those cities. And why aren't their Black leaders giving them examples or setting up good systems for them to do that rather than just encouraging them as they riot and complain?

I do know it's not a simple thing to acieve, but I have seen little progress since the powerful "I have a Dream" speech except, perhaps, in reagard to many Black families who have taken the leap to leave the cities and move to smaller towns and cities and beccome part of the middle class.

I worked once in Indianapolis as a humane educator for the city's Humane Society. The state had mandated that every child in public schools in that state had to have one lesson in humane education each year. We were always at some public school giving one of oour prepared programs. What surprised me were the many Black children in the majority Black schools who would scream with fright when I brought our mascot bassett hound to a program. He was the least frightening example of a dangerous dog one could find. I learned from the teachers it was because the Black parents kept alive in their children the stories of Black runaway slaves being shased down by whites with tracking dogs.

This was in the mid-seventies and in Indianapolis. I don't know what that experience says in regard to today's topic. But maybe it's part of the lesson that at some time, people of all colors need to leave the past in the past.

Off topic: LJ, I watched Pulp Fiction when it came out in our local theater surrouned by some evil looking bikers. I had been the designated mother to take three teenaged boys to that movie who were not quite old enough to be let in without an adult. Those boys did not want to be embarrassed by having a mommie there, so the sent me back to a row further back in the theater. Some late coming bikers came in and sat all around me. It was quite an experience. They were taking it very seriously, not seeing the dark "humor" I was seeing.

[Deap]

Media hypocrisy fueled the 2016 Trump revolution slow burn. Media has not learned a single thing from 2016.

Amen, LJ, amen. This new slow burn will carry through election day. And a far more seasoned Trump will finally get four years to get things done. Laying the groundwork with changes in the judiciary while flak was flying over his head right and left, proved Trump's mettle.

It will be good to get four years when the newly constituted 9th circuit court is not undermining every single effort to make America great again.

[upstater]

Lead the boycott of the NFL, Larry. Vote with your wallet.

Many people don't care what the NFL does or does not do. Ditto for the NCAA or any other sports business. Yawn! Wake me up when the Stupid Bowl is over.

[jose]

I totally agree, just got rid of ESPN on my lineup.

Gave up on all sports, just hope NCAA doesn't follow.

[FkDahl]

The San Francisco Police will no longer release booking photos because they "contribute to racial stereotypes" by showing who actually commits the crimes. Cute. In Sweden photos of arrested criminals are typically pixelated (exceptions for white men) - but the images have color levels adjusted up so the skin tone cannot be deduced...
Back to SF: the Modern Art Museum just had their most senior art curator resign because he refused to rule out buying art from male white artists.
The next line of conflict will be between East Asians and the woke.

[TV]

The NBA:
A trained seal can put a ball through a hoop.
Question is:
Who's smarter - Lebron James or the seal?
And I used to watch a lot of b-ball - NBA and NCAA.
I just got sick of the antics and self-importance by people who are barely literate.

[akaPatience]

So, why are professional sports exempt from diversity hiring?

[Vegetius]

I for one hope pro sports are cancelled forever.

Aside from the fact that it is juvenile and unseemly for old white men to waste what remains of their time, and paying good money, to watch young black men chase balls around, the lack of sportsball appears to be the only thing waking baby boomers up to the state of the nation they are leaving to their children and grandchildren.

Remarkable, really.

[Deap]

Gone forever, the hush on the streets during Super Bowl Sunday when "everyone" is indoors eating, drinking and yelling in good tribal fashion, and wives call 911 due to domestic violence. Good riddance .

[deap]

Victor Davis Hanson amplifies many of these same points - where or when will the silent majority snap back? https://www.westernjournal.com/victor-davis-hanson-can-defeat-revolution-reclaim-america-big/

The times are a changin' from the 1960's, have indeed changed.

[Fred]

akaPatience,

How much diversity is enough? In the NBA 70% of the players are Black. How many are Asian or Hispanic, or that other color? Obviously the NBA needs diversity, not just diversity as defined by black liberation movement backers.

[akaPatience]

Fred, you've missed my point about diversity: when blacks are overwhelmingly represented on a team (as they often are), why shouldn't more whites be hired? Why is meritocracy allowed in sports but not always elsewhere?

[Seamus Padraig]

I gave up on sportsball years ago. I don't miss it at all.

[Fred]

akaPatience,

" meritocracy allowed in sports but not always elsewhere?"

It isn't allowed in sports either; the goal is power.

[Flavius]

Good article, a fair and reasonable accounting that in a sane and healthy political environment should never have been needed; as it is, the financial collapse of the NFL and the NBA would be a harbinger of hope. Anthing less would mean that we're farther gone than we feared.
"...basket of deplorables..." Words heard around the country... and the morons claimed, and continue to claim, that they were done in by the Russians. If this bullshit resonates farther afield than our homegrown fascist moronocracy, we are farther gone than we feared.

[likbez]

@Diana Croissant | 22 July 2020 at 06:12 PM

Diana,

To a certain extent the live of the part of population in the USSR was as close to slavery as we can get. And I am not talking only about prisoners of Gulag. Volga Germans (who actually were invited to the country by Peter the Great) were definitely another such a group, especially after the start of WWII.

So in some ways the current and previous generations of USA blacks are a privileged part of the USA population who never experienced this level of hardships, persecution and lived uneventful but free from severe deprivations life in comparison with the immigrants from the USSR during this period.

I am the proud grandchild of Germans from Russia immigrants. They were called "Dirty Russians" and were often paid less than the law required for their stoop work thinning beets in the fields becaue they could not read English to learn how much they were supposed to be paid. They had escaped the Bolsheviks who stole their farms for the failed communist experiments in factory farming and communal farming.

They endured the prejudice with dignity and with a determination that they would work hard so their children and grandchildren could enjoy the freedoms of the USA. I have the photos of my grandparents on my mom's and my dad's side as they obtained their citizenship.

Thank you. I think a lot of emigrants from Russia/USSR during the period of 2017-1980 can relate to this experience.

[Deap]

Holding a US passport, as all American citizens do rich, poor, oppressed, POC, an/or privileged, is something we all do share and also remains a very much a globally envied possession.

How about if those who profess to hate America are allowed voluntarily to sell their US passport back to the US State Dept, for cash, which is sufficient to provides transit to another country of their choice willing to accept them.

Then their previous US citizenship slot can be allocated to someone on the long waiting list of those vetted and currently applying for legal status in the US. Win-win.

How many other travelers have had the experience abroad listening to locals rail against the US in public, only to have them ask in private if can we offer then any help getting a US visa?

Cash for clunkers becomes cash for contrarians. Both are good environmental clean ups.

[Sam]

Corporations that provide generous donations and free propaganda to keep all the social justice warriors in business have one goal in mind---keeping the supply of cheap foreign labor freely available to them whether those foreign workers are in China or are here in the USA legally or illegally.

[longarch]

How about if those who profess to hate America are allowed voluntarily to sell their US passport back to the US State Dept, for cash, which is sufficient to provides transit to another country of their choice willing to accept them.

Most countries would not want to take these emigrants. Very few countries allow Americans to become permanent residents without a very long, arduous process. However, Paraguay might be willing to accept these folks with minimal hassle.