What Trump doesn't understand: We're all Colin Kaepernick now
By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
Protests against injustice are as American as apple pie. Without protests, we’d still be a British colony. It began with the Boston Tea Party — there’s a reason the team’s called the New England Patriots.
Sadly, the current occupant of the Oval Office profoundly misunderstands what it means to be a patriotic American. That’s not a sentence I ever imagined writing — but I never imagined having a president so hostile to democratic rights — and so eager to use his bully pulpit to bully other citizens. Now he’s messing with Americans’ two favorite things: freedom and major league sports.
Trump seems intent on fomenting racial divisions — from referring to “very fine people” among neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to hurling an unprintable curse Friday night against a biracial Super Bowl quarterback who’s paid a high price for taking a taking a knee and a principled stand against racism, and others who’ve joined him. Trump doubled- and tripled-down on Twitter, demanding NFL owners fire players who protest and fans boycott games, and picking a separate fight with black basketball players. Trump wants to divide us, but with his anti-American attack on American values and pastimes, he might end up uniting us — and not in ways he expected.
Trump couldn’t be more wrong when he says taking a knee during the national anthem is unpatriotic or an insult to the military and first responders. The flag and national anthem don’t belong to Trump; they belong to all of us, and there is nothing more patriotic than respecting our constitution enough to peacefully protest inequities and trust our democratic system is strong enough that “we the people” can fix it.
First among America’s freedoms are our rights to free speech and to petition the government for “redress of grievances” — and when I say “first,” I mean that literally. Tragically, 37 percent of Americans can’t name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment; another seven percent answered wrong, according to a recent survey. How many of those cast votes for the angry demagogue who believes in the people so little as to thunder, “I alone can fix it” — and who now says we must bow to his views or be silenced? Two-thirds surveyed in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll now say Trump is dividing Americans; 57 percent disapprove of his performance.
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I don't like football. Some of us are late to this issue but no less outraged. 
