By J.T. Young
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
The NFL’s national anthem kneelers have fallen into
liberalism’s biggest trap, and finding Colin Kaepernick on the cover of GQ
despite not having played a game in 324 days will not get them out.
The Left is inherently inclined to self-indulgent
subjectivity that often alienates the majority they need to win over. Oblivious
to this, NFL protestors have taken a knee on liberals’ most dangerous pitfall:
Boring instead of persuading.
For an eleventh week, NFL players took to their knees
during the national anthem. Although protests were down on Veterans Day weekend
and have been decreasing, Thanksgiving offers a chance to reach a new and
broader audience and perhaps reinvigorate an effort trending to rigor mortis. Perhaps the kneelers’ attention has followed America’s
in wandering away. If so, they too have fallen victim to liberal activism’s
existential threat: Boredom.
Saul Alinsky was the godfather of American leftist
activism. In his protest primer, “Rules for Radicals,” he describes the Left’s
ultimate peril. “I cannot repeat too often that a conflict that drags on too
long becomes a drag…After a period of time it becomes monotonous, repetitive,
an emotional treadmill, and worse than anything else a bore.” Forty years and
40 yard-lines later, the NFL kneelers have become a case study in Alinsky’s
prescient warning.
Why Boredom Is
Inherent to Liberal Activism
The risk of boredom is inherent to liberal activism
because of its subjective, self-centered approach. It is the Left’s nature to
proclaim a problem, but never an endpoint for a solution. Liberals simply take
it as given that the vast majority of America must accept the Left’s premise
and wait patiently.
The conundrum manifests itself throughout liberals’
agenda. How do we know when the planet will have been saved? When will
affirmative-action programs have fulfilled their mission? What exactly
constitutes a “living wage?”
Liberals’ amorphous agenda-to-infinity often leads to a
muddle of one protest morphing into another with none ever really ending. Any
of the Left’s protests can supply evidence of this, inevitably attracting
aggrieved comrades until it resembles a Woodstock of Woe. The resulting common
perception is that the Left are only happy when they protest. For the majority
of America, such constancy quickly appears as futility and then becomes
boredom.
Why Are We Doing
This Again?
The NFL kneelers have captured—or rather, been captured
by—this leftist predicament. Their muddle began at the beginning: Over what
kneeling actually means. Kneelers currently say their action is not
disrespectful. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell reiterated recently the action is
not intended to be “disrespectful to the flag.” As he explained, the kneelers
“will state to you, and they have stated to everyone publicly, they are not
doing this in any way to be disrespectful to the flag.”
Goodell went on to say: “But they also understand how
it’s being interpreted.” No unbiased observer, Goodell would love nothing more
than to get his league out of the box kneelers have created for themselves and
the league. So he parrots the kneelers’ line while ignoring the problem: It
runs counter to the protest’s origins and common sense.
As every NFL fan knows, the kneeling protest began with
Kaepernick. When asked last summer why he was kneeling, he was crystal clear.
Speaking to NFL Media: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for
a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Kaepernick was
explicitly not standing because that he thought that equated to showing “pride
in a flag.”
Kaepernick kneeled, then, to show the opposite. However,
Kaepernick took it further than just a lack of pride in the flag, to also (and
more importantly) a lack of pride in the country it represents. People do not
respect what they do not have pride in. So his action intended to express that
and visibly differentiate him from those tens of thousands standing around him
showing pride in—and respect to—the flag, and thereby America.
So the rest of us are left to ponder the protest’s
diametrically opposed contradictions. Are there different factions within it?
Despite its originator plainly stating its intent and other kneelers copying
him, does it mean different things to different kneelers?
Of Course They’re
Protesting the Flag
Of course, the “no disrespect” excuse runs counter to
common sense too. The flag is a symbol, as Kaepernick points out and all the
kneelers know. This is precisely why they kneel during the national anthem.
They could easily have knelt at any other juncture and at any other venue, just
as any person could. However, using these countless other opportunities would
have lacked the impact that their deliberate ignoring of common treatment of
the flag intends to create.
Even Goodell acknowledges that the kneelers “also
understand how it’s being interpreted.” Of course they do, because that’s
precisely why they are doing it. They could have chosen any other approach and
not been “misinterpreted,” and stopped when it was (something the Left
immediately demands when its sensibilities are offended).
So how do the kneelers get up? Like liberal protests in
general, they have painted themselves into a corner. Having created a cause so
amorphous and pursuing it in so self-contradictory a way, there can be no real
resolution. There is no objective way to say what it even means, let alone that
it has been resolved. They have created a social version of a perpetual motion
machine. So there they kneel.
America has moved on from the self-contradiction and
repetition. If ever there was a definition for being bored, that is it. And if
ever there was a demonstration of it being the Left’s greatest potential
pitfall, this it. You do not need to read Saul Alinsky to understand it. Billy
Joel summed up the contrast between the kneelers’ self-view and the public’s
perception in “The Angry Young Man”: “And there’s always a place for the angry
young man / With his fist in the air and his head in the sand… / But his honor
is pure and his courage as well / And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring
as hell.”
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