Did You Cheer?

 

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 80^th 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!