The National Football League kicked off the fifty-fourth Super Bowl with an unabashedly patriotic video tribute to the American flag, to “remind us we’ve been through tough times before, but as a nation, we’ve always come through it together.”

The montage, which you can watch in the video above, featured America’s youngest living Medal of Honor recipient, Marine Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter and the “First Ladies of the NFL,” the wives who own the NFL teams, talking about the flag, “our most precious symbol of freedom,” and what it represents.

A recording of Ragged Old Flag, a spoken word tribute written and narrated by Johnny Cash, played over historic news clips and reenactments of important moments in American history. Cash wrote it in 1974, a prior time of political unrest in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal. His intention with the heartfelt verses was to “reaffirm faith in the country and the goodness of the American people.”

The current atmosphere of political divisiveness, as well as the unrest the NFL itself has experienced with the kneeling protests during the national anthem sparked by Colin Kaepernick were not mentioned in the video, for obvious reasons, but Cash’s words still ring true:

And she’s getting threadbare and wearing thin
But she’s in good shape for the shape she’s in
‘Cause she’s been through the fire before
And I believe she can take a whole lot more

The video ends with Carpenter solemnly saying, “God Bless America.”

Watch the full video tribute, above.

 

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2Ulw7ya