DID YOU CHEER OR DID YOU BOO?
By Jim
“Gymbeaux” Brown, February 11, 2025
INTERESTING TID-BIT:
Did you know, you can set up your iphone to read pages back to you? You can!
Go to Settings, then to Accessibility, then scroll down to
Spoken Content. Turn the various
selections on. If you do, you will then
see a light grey circle that appears on the side of the internet screen you
have selected. If you click on the circle,
it will take you to a control bar that enables you to have the page read to
you. You can even speed it up to save
time if you prefer.
Did you cheer or boo? This inquiring mind would like to know. When the camera zoomed in on President
Trump at the 2025 National Football League Super Bowl in New Orleans,
the people overwhelming cheered, did you cheer or did you boo. Where you excited to see him at the game or
were you disappointed?
I am writing this Nugget as I
approach my 80th birthday. I
only tell you this because that means that in my lifetime, I have experienced
the presidency of 14 Presidents starting with FDR. I cannot say that I remember anything about
FDR because I was so young but as for the remaining 13, I remember some vividly
and others like Truman and even Nixon, not so much. Truman because I was still young and the only
news we received back then was in the newspapers which I did not spend much
time reading. Social media did not exist
nor did televisions for that matter.
Nixon only because of lack of interest.
If you have read any of my previous
Nuggets for the Noggin, you then know that between 1965 and 1985 I served in
the U. S. Coast Guard. What some of you,
hopefully not you, may not know is that the U. S. Coast Guard WAS and IS
one of the branches of the U. S. Military.
All of the other branches, like the Army and Navy, are organized under
the Department of Defense. The Coast
Guard finds itself supervised by the Department of Homeland Security during
peacetime and the U. S. Navy/Department of Defense during times of war;
declared or otherwise.
It is important to this Nugget to
understand the above because the President of the United States is also the
Commander in Chief of all branches of the U. S. Military including the Coast
Guard. What most people fail to fully
grasp is that a PERSON serves as President who fills THE OFFICE
of the PRESIDENT. People being human,
they are subject to making mistakes both big and small. People are subject to being disliked just
because of the way they may appear to someone.
In other words, there are many reasons to like or dislike the PERSON
who has been voted in as the President of the United States. The ONE THING that NEVER
changes is that the two, PERSON and OFFICE are NOT one in
the same thing. As a member of the U. S.
Military, we are taught to respect the OFFICE of the President
and are expected to render respect to the PERSON who occupies that OFFICE. Therefore, when someone renders honors to the
President of the United States the PERSON, they are actually rendering
honors and respect to the OFFICE of the PRESIDENT; hopefully
both! In my opinion, publicly disrespecting
The Office of the President, regardless of WHO is occupying the office, is
unacceptable! PERIOD!
I would like to draw a mental
picture for you, bear with me. It is
7:30 in the morning and I am at the local golf club. I am on the practice range and practice
putting green getting ready for my tee time at 8:10 AM. It is very commonplace for golfers to warm up
by hitting shot after shot on the practice tee and then hitting putt after putt
on the practice green. Then like
clockwork, an employee of the club would appear at the flag pole at about 7:55
AM EVERY MORNING, rain or shine.
At 8:00 AM, just like on every military base around the world, he raises
the Flag of the United States. In this
case, there are not honors being played by a lone trumpeter, just the silence
of the wind. As you look around this
mental picture, you can easily identify the golfers on the tee and green who once
served in the military. They all come to
attention, remove their golf caps and place them over their heart until the
Flag is unfurled and standing tall. The
entire process takes but just a minute or two but it is the right thing to do
for anyone who had served in the military.
It is a military person’s way of honoring the colors (flag) of the
United States and all that it stands for.
It should be the same for everyone but unfortunately, it is not! You can see this as a lot of the golfers
would continue doing what they had been doing while the flag is being
hoisted.
I am well aware that most of the
people in the Super Dome cheered President Trump, the man, but there were also
many that honored the Office of the Presidency and some honored both. In my lifetime, there were Presidents that I
just didn’t like for very different reasons but most I had no strong feelings
about one way or another. I grew up knowing
and still remembering the slogan, “I Like Ike” when it came to President
Dwight Eisenhower; we all repeated it as kids. What was there not to like. He was a successful WWII General responsible
for the “good guys” winning WWII for the allies and now he was the
President. As for the others since Ike,
I despised Lyndon Johnson because of how he mishandled the
Vietnam War and got people killed and wounded needlessly and prolonged a war
that should never have been fought in the first place. John F. Kennedy was a very liable person
whether you voted for him or not. Jimmy
Carter was a “nice guy” but he was horrible for anyone in the military. I saw the morale of the troops circle the
drain during his presidency. Ronald
Reagan reversed all that during his term in office. I never trusted the
first George Bush; he was the first President that I can recall
that ever put forth the idea of a “new world order” as if it was a good thing;
it’s not! As for Bill Clinton,
they called him Slick Willie for a reason. Barrack Obama was and remains a
very questionable character in my book.
I attribute the increased racial divide in America to his presidency
plus as time goes by, we are learning more and more about the probable illegal
activities he oversaw in regards to defeating Donald Trump at any
cost. As for Joe Biden,
one side of me despises the man who on the surface singlehandedly destroyed
America on so many fronts. On the other
hand, I truly feel sorry for him because he was in obvious mental decline, not
of his own making. I am not even sure he
was running the country. Someone was,
but not Joe Biden! I fault his political
party for not taking the reins and removing him from office when they should
have for medical reasons. If they had,
maybe America would be in better condition than it was when Trump took office
for his second term.
I write about these Presidents to
prove my point that few if any are or were perfect, on the contrary, they are
human beings. People will say that no
matter who the president is, half of the population will support him or her and
half will oppose him or her. Personally,
I believe we are seeing the 80/20 Rule hard at work in every presidency. 80% of the population either outwardly or
quietly supports the president and the office of the president and 20% will NEVER
be satisfied and oppose everything a president tries to accomplish. I believe this to be true except for LBJ and
Biden where 80% of their activities adversely affected 100% of the
population. For LBJ it was the Vietnam
War. For Biden it was the open border,
increase in violent crimes and an out-of-control inflation rate.
I have never been in the presence
of a President of the United States. I
am well aware that some presidents during my lifetime I liked, others I did not
like at all, and a select few, I did not have any feeling toward one way or
another. Still, like the Flag of the
United States, and as a member of the military family, I would pay honors to every
President because each President represented The Office of the President and
was a/my Commander in Chief of the Military.
If you are like me, you probably
despise many of the things the Government of the United States does and has
done over history. If you research the REAL
history of the United States, it does not present the beautiful picture we were
taught in school back in the 1950s. In
fact, I should have realized that we were being lied to even back then when we
as elementary school students were told to take cover beneath our flimsy wooden
student desk in the event of an Atom Bomb Alert. Seriously?
Yet, like so many Americans on so many historical subjects, just believed
what they were told and never questioned what the government was telling us and
the media backed up with “news reports”.
Examples abound: Pearl Harbor, Vietnam,
9/11, Weapons of Mass Destruction, COVID, Vaccines, JFK, RFK and MLK murders,
Epstein Files, and there are more, many more!
Every President, good, bad or
indifferent, should always be respected as they fill the Office of the President. The Flag of the United States should ALWAYS
be respected; it has done no harm to you, EVER! We live in what I believe to be the greatest
country on Earth. If you do not believe
that I dare you to miss just one day by living elsewhere and then still say you
don’t love America. We are taught at a
very young age that hating people is just wrong. Hate is a powerful word! Do you hate anyone? I mean really hate them? Keep in mind, that if you lie about that, you
will most likely lie about almost anything.
In my own self-reflection, I understand that I do hate certain kinds of
people. First and foremost, I reserve
the right to hate anyone who needlessly puts the military and first responders
in harm’s way for power, money or glory.
Vietnam and the war caused by “weapons of mass destruction that did not
exist” immediately come to mind. I do
not hate the Hollywood Celebrity types who announce they are moving out of the
country because Donald Trump won the presidency but I reserve the
right to thoroughly despise them for acting out the temper tamper throwing
babies they truly are because THEY did not get THEIR way while
millions of others DID!
The ONLY people that should
get booed during a football game are the referees who make asinine calls
against invisible transgressions or in the case of the New Orleans Saints Playoff
Game, MAKE NO CALL AT ALL WHEN THE VIOLATION OF RULES OCCURRED RIGHT IN
FRONT OF TWO OF THE MEN IN STRIPES. They
deserve every boo they ever received and MORE!
But I digress.
President
Trump deserved to be cheered at the Super Bowl.
Taylor Swift DID NOT deserve to be booed as she was. She voiced her opinion on politics and even
switched from being an Eagles fan to a Chief’s fan (for good reason).
No one should be booed for voicing an
opinion! No one! If you don’t like it, ignore it! Being booed because you were once an Eagles
fan and are now a Chief’s fan; that’s an entirely different story. Have at it Eagle fans!
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