United

He should have just taken the money. Apparently that’s what everybody else would have done. He could have made his life a hell of a lot easier if he would have shut up and cashed in. Watching the Packer-Bear game it was obvious somebody needs a quarterback. I’m sure there are plenty of other teams around the league that could use a hand — or an arm. But he couldn’t just go along with the crowd. No, that’d be too easy. 50,000 fans standing in the stadium every week, tens of millions sprawled on bar stools and Lazy Boys and there he was taking a knee, blowing a hole in a once promising career. I get why he isn’t playing. He’s bad for business. After all, football isn’t just a game anymore. Besides, nobody wants to be preached to on a Sunday morning . . .

I spent way too much time reading Twitter feeds and Facebook posts about this young man and the shitstorm he created. According to some friends of mine who’ve been following the NFL their whole lives football players nowadays are all unpatriotic gangsters and domestic abusers, dog fighters and muscle heads. Of course nobody seemed to have a problem with that before. It was the silent kneeling kid that pushed them to torch their green and gold.

It turns out he was a good student in school and not a criminal type at all. He didn’t seem to me like someone who deserved to be called a son of a bitch by the president. Of course he’s got tattoos all over but so do all of my nephews and they’re not thugs. Psalms verses, “Faith,” “To God the Glory,” etched into his flesh. It’s also true that he has an issue with injustice, but you say he shouldn’t have worried about that in our already perfect union.

If you’re old enough to remember what the world was like before Twitter and Facebook you probably got your views about America from watching TV. I have a song stuck in my head from Schoolhouse Rock. I pulled the video up on YouTube for their rendition of the Preamble to the Constitution. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union . . . . insure the blessings of liberty . . .”

He didn’t start a tire fire in the street or fire bomb a church. He just didn’t think the job of building a more perfect union was done yet. As with so many things in this country we’re forced to take sides. But it’s not a black hats vs. white hats issue; home team vs. visitors. Like the kid in the center of all this it’s more complicated than that.

Countless millions standing united feel threatened by one young man whose conscience made him kneel. Do they even know why? It doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter whether you agree with him or not either. He’s an American and Americans aren’t required to follow the crowd or follow their leader. We celebrate our freedom. We sing songs about freedom, plaster the word on our shirts then shout down the kid who dares to voice his opinion with silence.

All he had to do was bite down on that mouthpiece for 60 minutes and everything would have been fine. Stand up and everything would be fine. Just sing the damn song . . .

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