How to Make Peace Over Trump and the NFL Kneelers

If you were in the NFL, would you take a knee? Or stand up and sing?

Colin K.Glad somebody finally asked. For I’ve long suspected racism from NFL owners, since I’m a middle-aged white guy who has a 25 percent BMI, can still run a sub-two minute 40, and yet here I remain, unsigned.

Whether I took a knee would depend on a lot of factors, like whether we were playing on artificial turf or natural grass. (If the latter, I’m for solidarity and all, I just don’t want to stain my pants.) Also, it would depend on how many cameras are on hand and how many other kneelers there were. It’s hard work these days, being a virtue-signaler when everyone is also being “brave” by simultaneously signaling their virtue. Back during simpler times, like say, Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s Black Power salute on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics, it was literally just two guys on a pedestal. Nowadays, it’s like being an extra in a crowd shot in Spartacus. You might even have to trip over creeps like Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones if you want to broadcast to the world that you’re a Person of Conscience™.

I don’t wish to relitigate the NFL’s whole #TakeAKnee saga. Everything that could be said about it pretty much has been. Twice. You have to get out of the blocks pretty fast if you want to say something novel and/or stake out your moral high ground in these here Divided States of America, where it’s clear that our national sport is no longer baseball or football, but rather ripping each other to shreds on the airwaves and Internet.

To that end, I will admit something unpleasant about myself: When all this business started, the only knee I wanted to take was to Colin Kaepernick’s solar plexus. He reflexively got on my nerves, spitting on a symbol so many of us hold dear, with his new-fangled faux-radical Angela Davis hair and his cops-as-pigs socks (and I don’t even particularly care for cops, who in my neck of the woods spend a lot more time bleeding revenue out of law-abiding citizens with speeding tickets than they do fighting real crime). If Kaepernick truly cared about abuses of authority and Oppressed Peoples of the Land on his Blame America First tour, he’d be a lot easier to take seriously if he didn’t show up in Fidel Castro t-shirts, as the late dictator held an entire island of slaves for the better part of a half-century.