STOP CRYING ABOUT PROTESTERS
Kneeling for the national anthem? Blabber, blabber, blabber,blabber.
Kneeling before the American flag? Disrespect? blabber,blabber, blabber, blabber
I’m really tired of hearing about it. Let me say that again: I’M REALLY SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT IT!
IF NFL players want to present a protest about the state of equality in the United States, it is their right to do so. THAT right is protected in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. Is their protest obnoxious, maybe. Is it offensive? I dunno, but to some mouth breathers, probably. Is it WRONG in some direct way? Simply put: NO.
I watched an episode about the Vietnam War on PBS last night, the first one I have watched and probably the last one. Last night they discussed the “end the war” protests, including the student shootings at Kent State. Oh, I remember it all so very, very well!
I also remembering walking down Main Street in Hyannis, Massachusetts that afternoon after having gone to Otis AFB for some official business. I parked the blue, Air Force Dodge pickup that had been my transport on the sidewalk and walked the two blocks to my friends store. I was wearing the normal summer duty uniform, khaki pants and short sleeve shirt, blue fore-and-aft cap, black shoes. I was a first lieutenant.
It wasn’t awfully busy for a summer afternoon, the crowds were thin. I was surprised when I passed this guy sitting on the sidewalk, back supported by a masonry store front, long hair a month passed needing to be washed. As I passed, not paying any attention, he spit at me.
Frankly, I was surprised. But that was basically the way it was: those of us in uniform because ADULT politicians had decided we needed to be so, were not seen as more than vermin by the majority that we’d meet on the street.
Tet was over by then. I was less than three months before rotating to Southeast Asia myself, and the really huge protests and riots in the streets hadn’t really gained a lot of steam by then. But we were far from “heroes”…merely cogs in the politicians’ wheel of greed, ignorance and avarice.
Before I went into the Air Force, I taught in a special Federal program in the inner city. The problem that we were supposedly there to address was basic racial inequality that kept so many youngsters from succeeding in school. The school administration was largely of either Italian-American, or Irish-American extraction. The students I was there to work with were African-American, Black Portuguese, some Cape Verdean, and a smattering of poor whites. What I learned in my two years was that basically the entrenched administration was bound and determined to keep those below, where they were. It’s called: “RACIAL INEQUALITY”. Heard that term before?
When i was in Southeast Asia every day I sat next to African American enlisted men. There was no racial difference there: we both had to do together what we had to do to perform our job. Period. I, like them, was not more than a cog in the machine. It was not my job or within my capability to investigate whether or not there was racial inequality outside of duty hours or tasks. There probably was, but “in the trench” we were the same color.
Now, I don’t consider kneeling in protest to be anything other than it is: a protest against discrimination and unequal treatment of non-white race in the United States. It is an on-going problem. It has nothing, REPEAT: NOTHING to do with disrespecting individual police officers, and especially nothing to do with our soldiers sent by stupid, inept and corrupt politicians to kill and maim people, most of whom have no real idea who’s doing the killing and maiming.
I am old enough to remember Vietnam when the story was first aired on television during dinner. I am old enough to have served my time in that war although I didn’t have to: I was not drafted, but a volunteer not only for service but for the war.
I suspect most of the people who are howliing about the NFL players being disrespectful have never served anything other than their own greedy bellies, have never worn a uniform of any kind, other than perhaps one of a Boy Scout, led by the draft dodger in the White House, the greediest belly of them all.
The outrage against the protests should be redirected. It should be focused on the systems here that are largely unchanged since the end of the War of the Insurrection. IF outrage should be expressed, it should not be directed at a bunch of athletes, but internally, at all of us. For those of us here, in this land of “liberty and justice for all” have failed to live up to our Constitution, to the opportunities given to us by those who worked hard hours, days, years and often died to preserve and protect that “one nation, under God indivisible”.
When the defects in our systems, in our nation, get exposed by protest, instead of tearing each other apart and those who legally protest down, we should take heed, examine exactly what is wrong and find a fix that will benefit All men and women, equally, as we are supposed to do. Any other action is an insult to those who went before, fought and died, and those who go forth now, fighting and dying for this nation to be better and live in a better world.
