Del gato means "Of the cat" in Puerto Rico

"What are they going to do, kick me out of the game? Take away my endorsements?"
--Carlos Delgado, Toronto Blue Jays Baseball Human, when asked about if he feared reprisals for a politcal ad he took out in the Washington Post, which slammed the Navy for testing some dangerous crap on a crap island near Puerto Rico and then never cleaning it up.

At New York Yankees games since 9/11/01, the song "God Bless America" has been presented in the 7th inning a la the National Anthem. People stand, a singer sings, and said people either sing along or just stand there. But not everyone has been playing their assigned part in this scenario. As reported in the Toronto Star (Star? Post? Random Newspaper Name?), Carlos Delgado has been quietly sitting in the dugout during the song because he doesn't agree with the Iraq war. Now, when an athlete does this, the reaction generally boils down to 2 schools:

1) Our military fights wars so that he will have the right to do this, so yay!
2) Our military fights wars so that he will have the right to do this, so him doing this makes him an ingrate, so boo!

And it never gets any further than this. But I want to boil it down, reduce it. What is he exactly doing? He is personally protesting our war in Iraq by refusing to stand for "God Bless America." I say personally because he did it quietly, so that nobody would notice. He didn't call attention to himself, and he didn't wear the Bush + Crap = 2 Craps T-shirt or whatever on the field. The vast majority of fans didn't even know it was going on. He's just anti-Iraq-war, and this is his way of showing it. In his (newspaper-quoted) words:

"But I think it's the stupidest war ever. Who are you fighting against? You're just getting ambushed now. We have more people dead now after the war than during the war. You've been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You've been looking for over a year. Can't find them. I don't support that. I don't support what they do. It's just stupid."

Putting aside for a second the 20/20 hindsight issue (in fact, putting aside the whole issue of whether or not his points on the stupidity of the war are valid), is refusing to stand during "God Bless America" really the right way to go about protesting this? Does it send the right message? And I bring this up only as an issue that Carlos himself can address, because it is a personal protest, with meaning solely to him, right? So what is he saying? That America should not be blessed? That's what I'm hearing. I don't know what Carlos is hearing.

Do you see the problem here? What he means to say is "I don't agree with the war in Iraq", which he had better amend with, "even though I love America for a) the opportunities and liberties it has given me and b) the willingness to protect those liberties with the lives of its citizens." What he actually is saying is "America should not be blessed...at all. F the mountains, F the valleys, F the blah blah white with snow." There's no mention of the war in Iraq or WMD finding or even Puerto Rico in the song. Why is he dissing the song?

This would be my message to Carlos: Be more thoughtful about the particulars of your protest, or people will misunderstand. They will think the thing you are saying with your actions (in this case, screw America) is what you actually believe, and they will whip a battery at your head.

And no matter what the "People Have the Right to Protest" crowd says, it will be your fault.