Donald Trump will go down in history as the first president of the United States to attempt to simultaneously run the National Football League. What a great job he did with United Football League back in the day, too, remember? Most of the world has caught on to his game by now. He is the schoolyard bully type, the one who sets a fire in a waste basket in the school room so that no one will notice that he just crapped in his pants. Then he blames someone else.

Let’s be clear, I have no use for the game of football anymore. It finishes a huge distance behind futbol, or soccer, in my estimation. If I wanted to watch people deliberately hurting each other for money I would move back to the city. I do have respect for people who play and have played the game, however, and that includes Colin Kaepernick and anyone else who has suffered the slings and arrows from the Tweeter in Chief. Phony patriotism is one of the sure signs of a demagogue. Now, for the first time in my life, Nike has done something right. The Swooshtika spreaders have apparently incurred the wrath of the misled and ill informed by launching an advertising campaign featuring Kaepernick. Instead of just doing it, we are all encouraged to believe in something even if means sacrificing everything. I’ll bet that phrase took lots of time to get polished but we’ll give the Nike crew the benefit of the doubt on this one. I won’t make jokes like “What if I believed the world was flat and sacrificed my future in physics or something?”

I have taken a vow to push back against the use of the phrase “pushing back” but I got out the old thesaurus and decided to use the term “reply”. Or maybe “oppose”.What Trump and other authoritarians want is for all of us to do whatever we are told to do and just knock off the high minded opinion stuff and, especially, any organized action that demonstrates that we fell for the idea that we were supposed to be free. So if they say that protesting any incident of perceived police brutality really means that we have crossed over a big line that separates the good from the bad then we should believe them. Of course, the reality is that police brutality exists because many people, especially those in power, enjoy it and perhaps quietly  approve of it because the only way that our system can thrive is if the haves keep the have nots in their place, munching on Papa John’s  lousy pizza and washing it down with Coors or Budweiser pissy beer.