“Now you come to me, and you say, ‘America, show me the money’; but you don’t even ask with respect. You don’t offer patriotism. You don’t even think to stand for my Flag.” — story title a collaborative prose effort by Don Corleone and America
The peculiar behavior of some NFL players before America’s flag unfurled reminds me of the story of the construction worker who made sparks.
The story begins with a construction worker engaged in the building of a mighty skyscraper in the midst of a mighty metropolis. His job was to join steel girders by hammering his round drift pin through their corresponding round holes and installing a rivet in said holes after he completed their alignment.
But one day he decided to attempt his job by using a square peg instead of his round drift pin. And his square peg was specially constructed of flint, a design very much his own. Well, he hammered away, but that square peg never did align those round holes; yet the effect of flint against steel created showers of glowing sparks that attracted the attention of co-workers and passersby alike. In fact, it attracted a great amount of attention, and he liked that attention a lot. He was questioned about why he liked so much to make sparks. He said that he thought it would fix the problem of bugs on city buses. But he finally had to admit he didn’t use the bus and that he never actually had seen these bugs and had only heard of them from his barber who had been told by others who had been told by still others about a bug infestation on city buses that was threatening to eliminate all bus riders. Most found this claim of a clear and present danger to bus riders to be a bit hard to believe and asked why he hadn’t used his own time to meet personally with bus riders and attempt to echo their concerns, once fully verified, directly to the bus company, city hall, and the like. But he thought his sparks were better. This mixed group of passersby and co-workers then attempted to point out to him that his sparks alone could never fix any problem but would certainly endanger the lives and reputations of those he worked alongside because of the abundance of flammable materials and by causing the building to not be completed, which in turn would cause a financial hardship for the developer. The construction worker then turned a bit ugly and accused everyone of hating bus riders.
However, an even bigger problem developed. There were actually some passersby and co-workers who were so bedazzled by his sparks and envious of the attention he got that they decided to create their own sparks too. This unfortunate movement began to spread but did not flourish. That is because the disunity that was created was not a creation at all but instead an atrophy. And like the building that was never finished, the shops, markets, museums, and factories of the great metropolis began to suffer as well. The city as a whole devolved, and those who used to visit from other great cities no longer found anything to attract them. The once great metropolis simply became contemptuous of its admirers. And so they stopped coming. Because the city stopped caring.
by Eric Schneller
