What Does the National Anthem Mean Today?

To you, and to all of us?

There was a girl in our friend group in college who, when we would all go to an Illini sporting event together, always sat down when they started playing the national anthem. She made a whole big thing out of it. As soon the public address announcer started saying, “those who are able, please stand and remove your caps,” she would begin to rustle demonstratively, make sure everyone around her was looking and then, with a big dramatic flair, take a seat. During the song, she would look up at the rest of us, even try to make eye contact, both to make sure we understood what she was doing and to pointedly note that if we had her moral courage, we’d be doing the same thing. No one really challenged her on this, I’m sure people would do that now, it would probably be a whole thing, someone would be live streaming her, she’d probably be live-streaming herself, but we that wasn’t really our thing in college. You just sort of tried to get from one day to the next. You simply shrugged and went back to the game.

I got my dander up more about it after I left college, when I thought about it more, when I could put it in more context. It was partly my inherent suspicion, even occasional contempt, for look-at-me self-promotion for no other purpose than one’s desperate need for attention; none of us ever knew exactly…