Welcome to the weekend refrigerator surprise, where everything goes even if it smells a little funky.
Some students at San Ramon’s California High School got quite an education this week — the kind you can’t get in the classroom.
Student leadership decided last month to discontinue playing the national anthem at rallies on campus. A local decision at a local school, right?
Not on your twilight’s last gleaming.
The students, according to the school newspaper, were responding to the objection of the NAACP over lyrics in the third verse.
You didn’t know there was a third verse of the anthem, did you? I did, but only because I was a Warriors fan in the early 1970s when a gentleman named Forrest Pritchett, a friend of team owner Franklin Mieuli, sang the fourth (and final) verse before home games. Pritchett’s delivery was quite dramatic, and I came to like the fourth verse better than the first. But I digress.
In the third verse lies the lyric: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” It is interpreted as the pursuit and killing of slaves.
Let’s start the discussion with a nod to the well-intentioned students who decided a song with a racist passage has no place on public school grounds. At a time when adolescents are beginning to develop a world view, the Cal High student leadership is putting its conviction into action.
Here is the hard lesson they are learning. One, there are some talking points that are sure to draw ire from all sides. The national anthem is a sure-fire gum-bumper. Not only has the decision to pull the anthem from rallies drawn criticism from the Cal High community, the story has been picked up by local television and regional newspapers, Snopes.com and something called ammoland.com. Of course, no partisan pie fight is complete without a take from Fox News, which suffixed its headline with “What the heck?” and charged that the anthem is under attack from a “rampaging mob of politically correct inclusivists.”
As a sportswriter, I heard hundreds of renditions of the anthem. It was not always taken seriously (a 49ers player compared one discordant anthem, sung by a so-called recording star, to “cats fighting”). Funny how that’s preferable to not playing the anthem at all.
To the Cal High student leaders, I would say this: Perhaps your decision might have played better if you had sought a broader consensus. Given the offending passage is in a verse that is little-known and never sung, you might have considered treating it as a no-harm, no-foul situation. But the part where you were guided by your ideals, don’t ever stop doing that.
The YouCaring.com effort to raise $25,000 so the two-time state champion McClymonds High School football players can have championship rings is inching its way toward the goal line. To date $16,000 has been raised. Coach Michael Peters has said that the effort is “a team thing” and that no one will get rings if everyone can’t have one.
Oakland is home to three professional sports franchises (Warriors, Raiders and A’s, who established the fund) which have player payrolls totaling more than half a billion dollars. For $3,000 apiece, they could make this dream come true.
Finally, per redoubtable BANG reporter David DeBolt, the Warriors and the operators of Oracle Arena have scheduled an arbitration hearing for July to resolve a dispute over $40 million in outstanding debt that will be on the books when the Warriors move to San Francisco for the 2019-20 season. Previous Warriors ownership agreed in 1996 to pay for $100 million in renovations. The current owners believe they shouldn’t have to pay for improvements in their old house when they move to their new house.
Two things: One, somewhere Chris Cohan is laughing so hard that milk is spraying out his nostrils. And two, I think I’ll try this gambit the next time I move houses.