MAKE a point rather than misrepresenting an issue.

MAKE a point rather than misrepresenting an issue.

Not a single player has communicated that 'America sucks', that's simply you're mistaken and pathetically fearful interpretation of what they're doing.

Try actually reading the Bill of Rights, or a book about what led to their incorporation.

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It’s okay if protest makes some people uncomfortable

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/25/1636...sts-racism

These acts of protest may make Trump uncomfortable. But the point of them is, to some degree, to make people uncomfortable. They are meant to show Americans that something is so wrong that the routine of American life simply cannot go on as is — so it must be interrupted in some way to draw the everyday person’s attention.

Typically, this happens by disrupting streets and businesses. Civil rights protesters in the 1960s, for example, seized control of restaurants and other establishments while conducting sit-ins. This forced the people there to confront the reality that many of these protesters — some of whom were black — typically were not allowed in these businesses simply because of their skin color.


Americans by and large look back favorably on the 1960s civil rights movement. But as Judd Legum noted over at ThinkProgress, it wasn’t always this way: Public opinion polls during the 1960s repeatedly found that a majority of Americans said black people should stop the civil rights demonstrations and that the protests would ultimately hurt black people. Just as many Americans look at today’s protests uncomfortably, the same was true back in the ’60s.

Black Lives Matter has continued this line of protests through street demonstrations over police use of force, some of which deliberately disrupt the flow of traffic — again interrupting the routine of American life.

NFL players like Kaepernick, however, have discovered that they have an important position of power in which the nation quite literally has its eyes on them. So they’ve cleverly leveraged this position of power by not standing up for the national anthem — something that is sure to get a lot of people’s attention.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said during his original protests. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

The point here isn’t to say that the US is bad and that the anthem and those who defend it are bad people. It’s to get people’s attention while simultaneously making the point that not everyone is as equal as our national narrative about “the land of the free and the home of the brave” might suggest.

The protests may make a lot of people uncomfortable and disrupt their routines. They may even get some people to turn off the TV next time the Bengals or Patriots are on.

But they’ve also given a higher profile to the issues these players are protesting. That could pay off in the long term, even if it’s making the president and others angry on Twitter right now.

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