Before a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers on August 26, San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick drew scrutiny by choosing to sit during the national anthem.
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While his teammates stood, he Saturday.
Maybe Kaepernick is talking about holding the criminals in Chicago who killed 10 people and injured 57 more in shootings last weekend accountable, but I highly doubt it.
“To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way”, he said.
Furthermore, the thought that there’s ever a “bad time” to discuss racial oppression and police brutality is incredibly privileged and harmful. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder”, he said, referring to a number of high-profile deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement.
About once every time I log onto any of my social media accounts these days, there’s a trending topic being discussed that gets old quickly and does nothing but get people emotional about certain topics. It’s also the most patriotic sentence I’ve ever read. The right to want more for others, freedom, liberty, justice, equality, and RESPECT.
The 28th annual “Salute to the Military” also features Powell returning to sing “God Bless America” during the game.
If he’s ahead of Driskel and Ponder, Kaepernick should make this team going into Week 1, right? “In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem”.
I even shamefully have to admit as the son and grandson of veterans and has great respect for those who put their lives on the line for this country and the people in it that I’ve caught myself checking my phone when an alert about a text message comes in during the song.
“I listened to him and he makes all the sense in the world”.
When I sing, it’s in gratitude for my uncle Mike Kerecman, who was in the 1st Ranger Battalion and fought in North Africa, where he got malaria and almost died from it. He endured lice and beatings and near starvation and solitary confinement in a box so small he suffered from post traumatic stress the rest of his life but never told his family. Rather than acknowledge faults in the country they so ardently profess to love, they’d prefer to see their squad celebrated uncritically.
I’m going to continue to sit. He didn’t sit out of laziness or inattention.
National Basketball Association legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offered a full-throated endorsement of Kaepernick’s protest in a Washington Post editorial in which he called the failure to address deep-seated racism in the United States “what’s really un-American here”.
Sunny Anderson, Food Network personality and a veteran tweeted: “I took an oath & served, so players on a team I don’t even like could have freedom of speech”. Just flip through your history book to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the civil rights movement. To me, this is something that has to change and when there is significant change and I feel like that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent and this country is representing people the way that it’s supposed to, I’ll stand.
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It isn’t a ideal beacon.
