Anation is sustained by its shared, ordinary practices: showing up to a child’s Saturday morning peewee game, sitting together as a family, standing as a community for the national anthem.

Recently, however, a new posture has emerged in public discourse: taking an ordinary American ritual, grading it against a private standard, declaring it moral failure, and asking for applause for seeing through it.

Two prominent figures illustrate this shift: politician Abdul El-Sayed and athlete Colin Kaepernick. Though operating in different arenas, both took a common civic practice, inverted its meaning, and cast the practice itself — and the people engaged in it — as foolish or corrupt.

The parent in the Bleachers

FIG. 1 THE STUDIO AS PULPIT

IN A PODCAST INTERVIEW, Abdul El-Sayed targeted a simple American sight: parents cheering enthusiastically for their child at a youth sports game. Mocking political rival Pete Hegseth, El-Sayed sneered at Hegseth’s mother for wearing her son’s jersey and baking a celebratory cake, claiming such support gave Hegseth a false sense of self-worth.

A hardship he recast as a superior parenting philosophy.

Against this, El-Sayed held up his own upbringing, noting his parents rarely attended his games — a hardship he recast as a superior parenting philosophy that kept him grounded.

The False Equivalence

Presence provides stability, reducing chronic developmental anxiety.

Absence is a hardship or constraint — not a virtue or a pedagogical method.

Missing a child’s game due to work shifts or life hardship is understandable, but calling that absence a “philosophy” is like calling skipping lessons a new way to teach piano.

A parent showing up consistently tells a child they are worth an adult’s time before they have done anything to earn it. It provides a steady baseline so the child spends less energy scanning for threats and more energy building skills.

El-Sayed took what he went without, called the deficit a virtue, and expressed contempt for the families who had what he was missing.

The anthem and the Stage

While El-Sayed targeted the private ritual of family support, Colin Kaepernick targeted the public ritual of civic unity. By choosing to sit (and later kneel) during the national anthem, Kaepernick transformed a single moment of shared, neutral ground into a personal stage.

Whatever the political merits of his grievance against systemic injustice, the mechanism of the gesture relied on disrupting a communal practice.

Civic Interference

In a shared civic space, no action is neutral. Rituals like the anthem work because everyone puts aside individual status for two minutes to acknowledge a mutual bond. When an individual uses that exact moment to broadcast a private dissent, the shared gesture breaks down.

D E S T R U C T I V E Interference

Physics offers a useful framework for understanding cultural practices: interference.

When ordinary practices — showing up for a kid, standing with a crowd — occupy the same space in phase, they reinforce one another. The combined amplitude of social trust exceeds what any individual could produce alone.

When those same practices are declared deficient and set out of phase by public mockery or refusal, the wave peaks meet wave troughs. The signals cancel out, and the overall envelope of civic trust shrinks.

Neither El-Sayed nor Kaepernick acted as outsiders throwing stones; both were elevated, educated, and enriched by the very society whose habits they dismissed.

When those who have benefited most from a culture’s institutions use their platform to demean its simplest, healthiest habits, they perform a kind of social betrayal.

They hand over the basic rituals that help strangers recognize one another as part of the same community —