Taking a knee is, at least to me, a bigger statement than BLM. Black Lives Matter, racial injustice, white supremacy is a critically important piece of this act of civil disobedience, but there is much, much more behind it. A history of events and acts brought us here.
I’ll never forget my friend Franko, after one of our 200 mile bike races, we were in Wildwood, NJ, noon the next day. On the boardwalk a loudspeaker started playing the national anthem and every one stopped. Some saluted, all stood at attention, with Franko screaming, “What are we, Pavlov’s Dogs?” Then sitting down on a bench. I joined him. No one liked that act much either.
I’ll be taking a knee or refusing to stand and salute until cops stop killing black men for selling untaxed cigarettes, and young men are no longer tortured and mutilated and drowned for saying “Hello” to a white woman, and kids aren’t shot in their cars for going for their wallets, during racially profiled traffic stops. The cops that commit these crimes hurt and endanger all of us, including the good a decent cops.
I’ll not stand and salute until we have a true representative government, and we address corruption, and term limits and lobbyists and the fact that it’s still legal to sell tobacco and dispense profitable opiate pain killers like they were Chiclets. I’ll not stand until there is no more Citizens United, and no more US congressmen in Moscow on July Fourth.
I’ll not stand until we address systematic racism and men like Mitch McConnell thinking that $1400 is making us all quit out jobs and sit around drinking beer. I’ll not stand until we have decent affordable health insurance, until we live in an economy that benefits the many, not the few. Until we have sensible gun laws and education is a right and not an expensive luxury affordable only to the affluent. I’ll not stand until the CEO, again, makes ten times what the line workers makes, not five hundred times. I’ll not stand until women stop being raped and that horrific act blamed on how they dress, and men in power think they can grope and touch women because they are men in power.
I’ll not stand until the children are all fed, not Boeing and Exxon. I’ll not stand until there is no more homelessness and heroin.
I’ll not stand until actual history is taught in schools and we learn of the Trail of Tears and what kind of men founded this country, men who owned other men. Until acts of hate like the Tuskegee Experiment are discussed in the classroom, not FaceBook, sixty years after it all occurred and the victims of this governments hate are all dead and gone. Until we openly face and address the slaughter and theft and rape of the native population of this nation.
I’ll not stand until we acknowledge that John Lewis being beaten bloody on the Edmond Pettus bridge in 1965 and the boys who died in A Shau Valley, in 1969 were all victims of the same machine that exists only for the profit of the ruling class.
If you want me to stand and salute give me something to be proud of, not ashamed in my soul.
I was not standing and not saluting long before Kaepernick. It is my honor to now join him.
I guess some of us will not be standing a pretty long time. It’s time to stop standing and saluting because that’s what we are expected to do, and start demanding justice.
I hear crap about taking a knee or refusing to stand is disrespectful to the men and women who served in the military and fought for American ‘freedom.’ What is truly disrespectful is refusing to acknowledge the truth and refusing to demand better, and standing and saluting because a song is played. It’s not about disrespect, it’s self respect and demanding decency for all people.
Like Franko said, we are not Pavlov’s Dogs.
If you want me to salute an ideal, make it so the ideal is not a lie.