By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — It’s been a few days Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand up during the pre-game rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.” During those few moments of his ill-advised and publicity-driven stunt, he nonetheless netted more salary than most Americans manage to earn in a year of labor and hard work at real jobs.
Kaepernick has every right to remain seated during the National Anthem. He also has the right to be stupid. His action, which purported to protest “America’s oppression of people of color” (a four-hundred year old travesty that I agree is a national mortification) was nonetheless gratuitous and hypocritical. He has hardly been oppressed personally, has never risked his life and throwing arm in a genuine civil rights protest, and likely has little detailed knowledge of what men and women like Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Cotton, Ralph Abernathy, and Diane Nash suffered through during the original Civil Rights Movement.
Diane Nash, for example—along with countless other young people of all colors—led by Rev. Jim Lawson, were routinely beaten to a pulp and arrested for sitting down at fiercely integrated lunch counters in places such as Nashville, Atlanta, and Jackson, Miss.
Colin Kaepernick can (and should) stand up for an America that, even with its heart-breaking problems of racial tension, economic disparities, a broken and unbalanced penal system, and disproportional police responses, remains the greatest experiment in democracy in the history of the world. Because truly brave and conscientious people marched and too often died brutally 50-60 years ago, Colin Kaepernick can run across the grid carrying a football and earning millions of dollars for it.
Deeply flawed as we are (and not afraid to confront those flaws), this nation—still the most philanthropic, trend-setting country on earth—remains the envy of the world and I am blood-proud of the fact that my parents brought me here as a family of immigrants two generations ago.
Every nation has issues and potholes and educational gaps and raging lunatics and a class of jingoists and a swollen sense-of-self but very few nations even have the freedom to flail about these. Ask the schoolteacher in Libya, the child in Somalia, the widow in North Korea. Don’t ask the heaps of dead children in Syria.
The Japanese have a vibrant, informed (if cyber-beaten) culture but the social infrastructure of that state was built on the fact of our liberating Japan from itself by 1945. China is rising, but you can barely see it in the inhumanly toxic air of Beijing and you are safer breathing the fumes of Los Angeles than opening your mouth in Shanghai. India is a manufacturing juggernaut now but people and dirt and destitution are all comingling in the very streets of Mumbai and New Delhi.
We do have an immigration crisis in our America, but this has a lot to do with the universal dream of human beings to leave where they are and to come here. It’s hard to trace any particular emigration trail outbound to Latin America, Asia, or even the newly-emergent domains of Eastern Europe.
People romanticize Paris (and it is a most glorious city, indeed) but the French are the first to vacillate when it comes to standing up behind any of their tiresome bromides of self-importance and condescension. I feel that folks are more dependable and actually friendly in Kansas City or Seattle.
Europe, though shimmering with history and beauty and great food, is overly glamorized even in American minds. It’s as if the entire continent wasn’t engaged—just 70 years ago—in an unspeakably pandemic genocide of its Jews, homosexuals, handicapped, righteous Christians, and other racially undesirables that erased more than 59 million human souls from this life. Yes, I’ll holiday in Rome but bring me home to the USA.
Colin, get up and sing—along with the wheelchair-bound veterans in the stands who still find a way to life themselves up when the National Anthem is heard.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Oceanside, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. To comment in the space below, include your full name and city and state of residence (city and country if outside the U.S.)