Mike Ditka, an American imbecile

"Mike Ditka to Colin Kaepernick: 'Get the hell out' if you don't like America" This is the headline for an article in "The Guardian," a real British daily newspaper. The salient sentence however is in the body of the article:   ".... I like this country, I respect our flag, and I don’t see all the atrocities going on in this country that people say are going on."


        Of course he doesn't. And I remember a time when I actually used to admire this man. If he "doesn't see all the atrocities....etc" then either Ditka sustained one too many blows to the head or  NFL retirement options don't include vision screening. This is just one more of many such examples of morons who apparently believe that blind support of everything your country does, even when some of it terribly wrong and can be changed to be better, is real patriotism.

        Real patriotism means first of all honesty, honor and love of the best in the country, and the corollary to that is the truthful acknowledgement that we can, all of us, be better than we have to this point.  American "exceptionalism" if it truly existed on the grand scale would mean seeing all our citizens and human contacts as individuals rather than a stereotype. It would mean acceptance, without the necessity having it legally adjudicated, of the fact that we are all equally entitled to, in Jefferson's words, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without having some sunshine  patriot mental defective decide that the concept only applies to heterosexual white males of the Christian faith. People like Ditka  are the Levites and Pharisees, while people like Jimmy Carter show us what the parable of the good Samaritan really was about.

         Of course the Buddha's teaching originated the concept about 500 years earlier as was also the case with the prodigal son story. In fact, between Aesop and Buddha with a sprinkling of Confucius' more male centered morality, everything we consider the moral teachings of Jesus predates the generally accepted date of his birth by around 500 years, weird, huh? Don't tell Mike Ditka, he thinks Jesus is his yard guy, Buddha was "that fat lineman",  and Confucius is "that  Chinese joke guy."