Not Standing with Colin Kaepernick

I thought of posting about Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for "The National Anthem" in protest against black oppression last week when the story was all the rage…and I do mean rage. But then I thought, No, this is one of those evergreen stories. Every five years or so, the nation’s outrage is stirred by someone doing that most American of things: protesting. The Tea Party, the original one...the one directed at taxation without representation, not taxation all together, was of course a protest against the ruling order of the time…and an act of outright vandalism against a flag as opposed to mere disrespect of a flag.
Though not a high profile figure like Kaepernick--an NFL quarterback who started in a Super Bowl--I’ve had more than a couple of go’s at public protest. Oddly, not counting editorials in student papers from high school to college to underground—my first overt public protest was in church. Later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, I engaged in precisely the protest that Kaepernick is doing right now…at ball games I would refuse to stand for "The National Anthem". Unlike Kaepernick, it could not be said that I was trying to start a national dialog with my protest because mine was so small and isolated that the only ones who might talk about it were those sitting immediately around me in the bleachers. (After 9/11, when shows of patriotism were close to becoming mandatory and excessive…and actually codified in the Patriot Act…I refused to have God Bless America forced upon me as a second national anthem and was confronted by a jingoist at Dodger Stadium who ordered me to take my hat off for it. I glared back at him, and with my hat firmly in place turned and walked away. So much for national dialog…)  
My protest was more in line with Henry David Thoreau, the putative godfather of American protest, who wrote: “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience…? Why has every man a conscience then?” My protest was a matter of individual conscience against my country’s attack on and conduct in Vietnam. Much of Thoreau’s writing in his great essay Civil Disobedience was motivated by his moral objections to America’s military venture into Mexico and slavery…thus war and race, the two persistent blisters on our body politic. 

One can get lost in the particulars of any one protest, as many have done over Kaepernick’s. The most glaring distraction in Kaepernick’s case is that it’s a racial thing, as if a recognized white player sitting out "The National Anthem" would get a pass on it because of…well, what else? White privilege. Yeah, let’s just see how much of a pass Tom Brady’s whiteness or privilege would get him if he dared do what Kaepernick is doing (on second thought, let’s not see...TB12 has enough problems). Anyway, once you start breaking down protests into racial, gender, religious or even partisan terms, you get away from the larger, more fundamental questions of protest…which is fine, but that’s not the way the Nobby works. Here, we love to explore the bigger questions, and in this case there are two.

The first concerns the Enlightenment ideal expressed in the actions, if not the exact words, of Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That would be an attitude more attuned to a time when humanity was just rising up against centuries of oppressive, rigid, religious and hereditary rule and anyone who spoke against it in general was a natural ally of everyone else who spoke up against it, regardless of the details. It was a clear case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and there was a natural alliance among free thinkers and would-be free thinkers. Nowadays, the President of the United States, the head of the ruling order, actually has to go before a college audience and plead with students and academics to be tolerant of differing opinions. The prevailing attitude today is “I disapprove of what you say, and I will legislate, hashtag, troll, block, boycott, and protest to yourdeath your right to say it.”
The second question is Thoreau’s question: “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience…? Why has every man a conscience then?” Acts of conscience are part of the fabric of American life, back to Thoreau, through the Abolitionist movement, to the conscientious objectors of World Wars I & II, but acts of conscience seemed to attract a higher level of condemnation round about the time Dylan sang: “If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” That would be about the same time Muhammad Ali was pretty much setting the template for what would be our (ahem) national dialog over acts of conscience. Acting on conscience came to be seen as an affront to the nation, rather than an expression of deeply held personal conviction...the right to which the nation was created. The thing had turned against the thing that had given it birth.

An act of conscience is not an end in itself of course. A public act of conscience, like Ali’s or Kaepernick’s, is as likely to provoke a counter act of conscience as inspire a similar act. If I’m going to dare to wear my cap at the ballpark during the playing of "God Bless America", I should not be surprised that I might incite the conscience of another citizen to confront me. That seems to be a trade-off that all of us living in a free democracy should be willing to accept. And when your conscience and my conscience conflict, we should also agree that we resolve that conflict through legal, rational means…not by letting brute might determine whose conscience is right. For all the hostility directed at Kaepernick, we have yet to see the police or military attempt to physically pull him to his feet and make him stand for "The National Anthem". If and when that happens (and it could be sooner than we like to think), the essence of the country will be lost surer than on any battlefield. But so far, so good…the Colin Kaepernick episode assures us that it’s still as okay to display individual conscience in America as it is to display the flag.