For Independence Day, we had tickets to the Dodgers game, and my daughter was excited about the prospect of a fireworks show. The fireworks were great, although it was a little awkward as tens of thousands of fans had to sit through an 18-1 blowout just to get to the end of game celebration.

The ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by Rick Monday, Dodgers royalty who, as a player, was before my time but who is known more broadly for his work on the radio broadcasts, which I rarely listen to. Not enough to have any personal feelings toward him as a person or personality.

The July 4th tie-in was the time that Monday “heroically” saved an American flag from a center field protest in 1976 at Dodger Stadium.

I grew up in Idaho, in the 90s, as a member of the Boy Scouts, surrounded by Vietnam veterans. So I absorbed a lot of the content-free “disrespecting America should be illegal” discourse that always completely sidestepped the ideologies of the protests and treated the protesters as rabid America haters. But I also heard the personal stories of men who went through hell, telling themselves that their country needed their sacrifice, only to arrive home and find out that the situation was more nuanced than that.

So I was understandably skeptical about the whole rah-rah America attitude, especially while a whole segment of our leaders are intent on destroying our institutions and calling it patriotism, while a large portion of the population is intent on respecting their authority and calling it patriotism. Of course, it didn’t help that Monday paired up with election denier Blake Treinen to throw out the first pitch. And I wasn’t terribly surprised to find out that at one point Monday tried to save the American flag from Colin Kaepernick as well.

Kudos to the Dodgers, however, for picking Lauren Evans to sing the national anthem. In a time when mediocre white men are shameless enough to claim with a straight face that the existence of a minority in power is evidence of anti-White racism, it is good to be reminded that a Black woman can match and beat their “patriotism”.

And while the Dodgers, mercifully, don’t generally follow the “God Bless America” tradition, they made an exception for Independence Day. But once again, they asked Lauren Evans to sing, and it was good to be reminded that this is her land, her home, my land, my home, their land, their home, and not just Trump’s land, however much he wants to claim it for his own.

I like to think someone in the organization planned the whole thing to piss Rick Monday off. They even managed to show him on the video boards, standing as Evans sang for blessings on our mountains and our prairies, looking bored out of his mind.