We cats weren't planning to blog about Don Cherry again, but now that the NFL has invited all 32 teams to a workout with Colin Kaepernick in Atlanta, we've changed our minds. Because the first thought that popped into our furry brains when we heard the Colin news was "Gosh! That's just the kind of thing that would make Don Cherry mad!"
Yes, his domain was hockey, not US football — but principled players of color, no matter the sport, were never Cherry's cup of tea. So here we are, typing away, while Cherry, having just lost his platform for hatemongering, has to stew in private.
And the True North will be better for it. We've run across the bleating tweets from a few disgruntled Canadian MAGA types, decrying the state of their country because an 85-year-old bigot got canned. Maybe they think Hockey Night in Canada is still owned by the CBC? It's the property of Rogers Sportsnet, a private corporation which is sensitive to what the market will bear and, therefore, can fire whom it pleases. (It's so funny how right wingers scream like scalded cats about free speech when the private sector, which they usually defend so ardently, accommodates customers who are offended by someone like Cherry.)
Meanwhile, we couldn't help noticing that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau allowed his Minister of Defense, a no-nonsense, badass-looking Sikh dude in a turban, to take the lead on the Twitter machine to educate folks on the many religious and ethnic minorities who have donned the uniform and fought for Canada. As you probably can guess, Don Cherry never has. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
Our ultimate conclusion? Cherry's outburst on Remembrance Day weekend was not so much about poppies as about the recent election. He just can't get over the fact that Trudeau is back in, even with a minority government. Times have changed, diversity is our strength, and Old Don is fit to be tied about it.
As Cathal Kelly wrote so eloquently in The Globe and Mail, Cherry "had finally taken on
something too big even for him — our collective values. He’d given the
country the excuse it needed to move on from the past.
"In the end, bigotry didn’t take down Don Cherry. He’d always been a bigot. What got him in the end was Canada." We cats PURR.
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