- Sep 1, 2017
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well said. It does seem like everything he does is a side show. I don't really know his involvement behind the scenes and out of the public eye re: advancing the cause he speaks about. If he is doing a lot to advance those causes in areas we just don't know about, and he works diligently and seriously without creating unnecessary antagonism, then good on him. But his biggest stage was the football field and he used it and then that petered out because he caused a large segment of the fanbase the NFL and it's owners needed to be on board with to get turned off and create a backlash against the league. It's a divisive issue. He could have played football, tried to do his best to improve and get to a starring role in the SB and just done his political platform in another venue...away from the football field and tried to speak intellectually about it in that venue. I think the team/league even offered to give him a day or several hours every week or whatever to voice his opinion/concerns as long as it didn't involve the football field/national anthem. I'm thinking he would have been more effective had he gone that route.Kaepernick had a legit beef regarding police brutality against black people. I wish he had chosen a way less offensive way of taking a stand, but just about every successful protest had something shitty about it. It isn't like I think marches that tie up traffic are without a large degree of annoyance.
Where Kaepernick lost me is when he let the NFL pay him off to keep his mouth shut about something. That showed that, even if this protest started as something greater than Kaepernick, he eventually let down the movement and began thinking purely about himself. Now all his actions are about Kaepernick and no longer about fighting police brutality. If he was going to take on the job as the face of a movement, he shouldn't have turned a bunch of patriots (real vets and wannabes) against the movement and then turned said movement into something that is now purely about Kaepernick's NFL career. He turned a serious movement started by others into the Kaepernick football show. He didn't help. I mean - look what you guys are arguing about. It isn't about police brutality against black people; it is about Kaepernick's NFL career. I don't remember the history books talking about MLK's fight to get a top TV evangelist job or Frederick Douglass's effort to score a big payday. Those guys didn't treat their movements as sideshows for some entertainment corporation.