As the sportswriter and critic Howard Bryant has written: “Not only did America seem to be in lockstep in honoring the military, but the cultural pressure against dissent was so strong, opponents didn’t dare speak out against fifty thousand flag-wavers.” Kaepernick was but one of an increasing number of athletes who had enough of fifteen years of blind obedience to a state of perpetual war. Enough with the elevation of the police to the status of military heroes, a conflation that was a legacy of 9/11.
