The Kneel That Revealed America

The Kneel That Revealed America 

John Derryberry 

Colin Kaepernick at first refused to stand for the national anthem. He sat on the bench to protest a police brutality case. The outcome of that case was a jury decided no police brutality occurred. After talking with man with past military service Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest social injustice in America and what has transpired since has revealed America’s ugly truth. Maybe how this all started is irrevelant maybe it isn't but there is a lot of social injustice in our country.  We would rather debate the merits of standing or not standing for our national anthem. That’s the "problem" our leaders decided to focus on because we aren’t concerned with solving the other ones. It makes for a great distraction. It follows a long line of white leaders using black people to scare their followers into anger. It follows the long path in America that the only thing that matters is dollar signs. (The white) NFL owners worried about losing money so they made a rule saying you cannot kneel during the anthem. Give any of one of the owners' truth serum, and they wouldn’t have cared about the kneeling if the ratings, sponsorship dollars, and the number of fans went up. When money is your moral compass, you have failed as a human being.

Why do leaders divide and distract us, pushing narratives and rivalries like rich vs. poor, white vs. black, healthy vs. unhealthy? Because the issues we face as a nation are hard to solve. We do not have a single leader who can resolve complicated matters. So they reach for distractions, and they found one by labeling a black quarterback, un-American, for kneeling during the national anthem. They especially love to fan the flames of issues related to being un-American. They don’t stop selling concessions during the national anthem, and they stamp the flag on merchandise even though it’s against the flag code. Oh, that’s right, it’s ok to be un-American as long as you are turning a profit. I cannot but wonder, with our country’s racial history, if a prominent white NFL player was the first to start kneeling how different the conversation would have been. We still have a problem with successful black people challenging the status quo; I mean, Lebron James had the N-word spray painted on his door and all he does is send thousands of kids to college debt-free with his foundation, oh, and win some NBA titles along the way. But some white dude wanted Lebron to know black’s people place, which is behind every white person, no matter how successful you are.

We can debate the reasons why the wealthiest country on the earth still has all these inequality problems another day. Let’s start with facts. Prisons are too crowded, mostly with black men. Pharmaceutical companies got rich by creating government-sanctioned, addiction-gutting communities and families.  The homeless population increases, yet we do not fund the programs to help. You are in more danger in an American High School than on the battlefield. The number of families living in poverty grows daily, but Walmart and Amazon don't pay people what they're wort h. Twenty-one veterans commit suicide every day but tell me again why we had to rush fixing the made-up kneeling problem that brought awareness to these issues. There are two reasons: one, because it was affecting some billionaire owner's bottom line, and two, because it was easy. The purpose of this blog is not to bash conservative or liberal ideals. People in both these groups have beautiful models to solve gun violence, the need for police reform, income inequality, and other problems we face today. It is a reminder that what our leaders call un-American is, in its purest form, BEING an American.

Our birth as a nation is based on overthrowing a king and the greatest army at that time in history. We raised a middle finger to that authority and stated that every man was created equal. And, throughout our history, we have tried to grow that idea to include everyone. Yet, here we sit, letting our leaders divide us over a man taking a knee against the people in charge today, the same people who have allowed these horrible conditions to fester in the first place. To me, that is about as un-American as it gets. We were created by challenging the status quo. We built statues and monuments throughout our history to those who moved us closer to the ideal that every person is created equal. Leaders can make their rules, and they can blackball a black man who kneels in protest. It won’t stop the true American spirit from moving forward. It was no different in 1773, when a corrupt leader and the British Parliament, only worried about their bottom line. They decided to uphold a tea tax on the colonies in an attempt to do a financial bail-out of the (British) East India Company, thus undercutting merchants in the colonies. We know how that ended. We rose up and dropped that tea in the Boston harbor and I have a feeling we will rise again and create a better definition of what it means to be an American.