I took the 5-year old to the OU football game on Saturday. This is the first time he's had to stand up while the national anthem is being played, so I had to tell him what to do. "Put your hand over your chest," I told him, "and look to your right, towards the flag." There were three flags being raised, so that kept his interest until the end of the anthem.
"What are the three flags?," he asked after the crowd had chimed in with "Sooners" where the anthem ends "land of the brave" (don't get me started).
"The one in the middle is the American flag," I told him, "the blue one to the right is the Oklahoma flag and the red one to the left is the OU flag."
He processed that for a while.
"And which one were we praying to?", he finally asked.
That's a great story. What did you tell him?
ReplyDeleteBTW, the alteration to the anthem that you mentioned remains my biggest gripe about my fellow Sooner fans. The guy who sits next to me doesn't bother to sing the rest of the anthem (assuming he knows the words), but yells "Sooners" at the top of his lungs right at the end. I haven't mentioned anything to him about the inappropriateness of "defacing" our national anthem - judging by his comments and behaviour over the past several seasons, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't even understand my point, much less quit doing it.