Regarding NFL & Colin Kaepernick – We Can Either Stand Together, Or Bend Over One At A Time.

(ThyBlackMan.com) Regarding the Colin Kaepernick controversy. I must be missing a gene or something, because I’ve never understood people’s fascination with sports.  What is it that’s so great about sports?  My father was the very same way.  I once asked him if he ever participated in sports, and he told me, “The only time I ever ran was if the vice squad was after me.”  I laughed, because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I was going through that very same kind of thing even as we spoke.
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I don’t know what it is about some White folks, but many of them just can’t seem to be content with simply minding their own damn business – that’s the major problem I have with most Republicans to this day.  They’re not content to just live and let live; it seems that they just can’t find happiness unless they’re trying to shove their values down everybody else’s throat, and by law.  But it was because of such people that I first began to recognize my athletic ability.
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I’ve never in my life had even a passing interest in sports. Even in elementary school when all the other boys were playing kickball, I’d be the kid sitting on the bench staring out into space.  But that didn’t mean I wasn’t athletic. When I became a teenager I was 6’2″, weighed about 200lbs, and could run like a gazelle. But the only time I ever used my athletic ability was, like my father said, when I was running from the vice squad.  I saw it as a harmless form of payback – humiliating the White boys.  It actually became a game between us, and not a mean-spirited one. They weren’t out to kill you back then, so even if I got caught, since I wasn’t committing a major crime, I’d only have to spend the weekend in jail.  But I had absolutely no intention of letting that ever happening.
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You see, when I was a teenager we use to sit around in the projects shootin’ dice, smokin’ weed, and laughing and joking with one another, but we didn’t bother anybody.  In spite of our peaceful nature, however, up would roar the vice squad in an attempt to shove society’s moral values down our throats.  They’d be wearing street clothes and tennis shoes, and they would jump out of their station wagons and start running us down. I’d be laughing so hard I could barely run – but oh, could I run. And I loved the chase, because these cops were especially chosen for that duty because they were the most athletic White boys on the force. So I absolutely loved it every time I would see them coming because that gave me the chance to humiliate this one cop in particular.  Those White boys would be killing themselves trying to catch us, but there was no use, because they were greatly out-classed.  So that was the only joy I’ve ever gotten out of sports, and for me, it was a sport – “Humiliating the White boy in the hundred yard dash.”
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But other than that, I’ve never understood the appeal of sports.  I’d rather spend a day in jail than a day at ANY sporting event, because at least in jail I could lay around, read something, and get a free meal or two, but at a sporting event there’s nothing to do but watch grown-ass people doing “the wave” in a mindless exercise of group-think.
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The biggest problem I had with sports was my lack of patriotic fervor. I just didn’t give a damn who won, and I couldn’t make myself give a damn.  I’ve never been able to generate that “Rah, Rah! We’re the greatest!” kind of team spirit.  It’s always seemed silly to me.  Why should I give a damn which team won, I wasn’t getting anything out of it?  So my feeling has always been, if Black people would just spend half the time developing their minds as they do focusing on this useless nonsense, we’d be at the top of society today.  After all, any dog can outrun the fastest man alive.  So it’s our minds that make us human, and it’s development should be our very top priority.  I learned that from a teacher in elementary school when they were about to place me in “Special Training” – or the “Dunce Brigade” as the kids use to call it – because they thought I was retarded, probably because I wasn’t interested in playing kickball.  People are like that – if you don’t think like everybody else they think it’s something wrong with you.  But I had a teacher (Ms Lady Lee) who taught me both the key, and the joy, of using my mind.  She gave me a toy to play with, and it has served me well every since (AMERICA’S GOT ITS PRIORITIES CONFUSED). 
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Sports cater to our most primitive instincts – “I’m better than you, and our team is better than your team”- So sports are divisive by their very nature.  They rely on a mindset that is at the root of every form of bigotry, and is the primary source of all wars, hatred, killing, and mayhem in the world today – yet, it’s often referred to as “good, clean, fun.”
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But how good and clean is it?  When you look at two football teams on the field with their coaches and staff on the sidelines, what you’re actually seeing is two opposing armies preparing to go into battle.  The players are the troops, the coaches are the generals, the coaches’ staff are the military officers, and the owners of the team represent Exxon/Mobile.  So when we teach our children to embrace sports mentality, we’re preparing them to believe it’s an honor to go die in a foreign country for no other reason than to “Win one for the Gipper.”

That’s a lot syrupy and sentimental, mind-bending bullshit. To hell with the Gipper!  We need to teach our children to develop the independence of thought to win one for themselves, their families, and their culture – and you can’t fit an entire culture on a football field.  We don’t see the children of the rich dying for the Gipper – Donald Trump avoided going to Vietnam by getting 5 draft deferments, and so did Dick Cheney.  Rush Limbaugh got out of going to war by complaining of a boil on his fat ass.  Yet today, now that they don’t have to put their own lives on the line, they’ve never seen a war that they didn’t like.  Yes, people die, and families are destroyed forever by war, but wars generate corporate wealth, and that’s what’s important.  “And don’t we give them medals, and bury them with great fanfare and national honor?  So these national heroes are proud to sacrifice their ‘little lives’ in the nation’s interest.”
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So this super-patriotic “Gipper” mentality at the root of all sports is a bunch of bullshit that even many “enlightened” Black people have bought into. I often hear them refer to “My team.” I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, those teams don’t give a damn about you.  For that reason, whenever I see Black people getting all excited over sports and teams it makes me want to throw up, because it makes it disgustingly clear that before we can ever even hope to become truly liberated, we’re going to have to address our dire need to be re-educated, and shed ourselves of a lifetime of White supremacist programing. We’ve been so fully indoctrinated into the culture of White supremacy that we’ve become not only some of it’s biggest supporters, but it’s most enthusiastic sustainers, and they’ve got us so star-struck over the exploits of various sports figures that we’re too blind to even recognize it – and in the NFL 70% of those stars are Black!
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Take the Colin Kaepernick controversy, for example.  I’ve heard Black people call him a damn fool, and say that he should have just stood up and kept his mouth shut. But what these people seem to be completely blind to is the importance of what he’s refusing to stand up for, and what he’s speaking out against.
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This nation has NEVER lived up to the myth that the American flag is suppose to represent. After being welcomed to this land by the Native Americans, they responded by presenting them with disease-infected blankets and then bringing in their army to eradicate them. In the end they killed as many as 100 million Native Americans in order to steal their land. Thereafter, they moved on to either kill are make the lives of millions of African slaves miserable. Then after slavery, there was the Jim Crow era in which millions of African-Americans were discriminated against, brutalized, and in many cases murdered. And during that same time the nation was involved in WWII where Japanese-American citizens had their property seized and entire families were placed in concentration camps. In addition, the United States dropped not one, but two atomic bombs on Japan – and since the men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were noncombatants, that constituted the most brutal and heartless act of terrorism in all of human history.
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But “America the Beautiful” still wasn’t done. It went on to kill 3.1 million Vietnamese (2 million of which were innocent civilian men, women, and children), and then they did the very same thing to the people of Iraq, but they were more compassionate with the Iraqis – they only killed a million of them. But they killed them for no reason whatsoever, other than they didn’t like the cut of their jib. So tell me, exactly what is it that Colin Kaepernick suppose to be so proud of that he should feel obligated to stand every time he hears a song?  It’s not as if either the song, or the flag, represents a history of great acts of human compassion – it’s a flag that represents 241 years of criminal brutality, thuggery and mayhem. So the fact is, if we base our analysis on what is suppose to be American values as oppose to what we actually are, Kaepernick was the only true patriot in the stadium, and those who are condemning him are un-American heathens who are actually the ones who are responsible for degrading the flag.  After all, they’re condemning Kaeperick for exercising the very rights that the flag is suppose to represent.  So his condemnation is gross hypocrisy any way you look at it, and in this era of Donald Trump, this nation is becoming ever more renown for such hypocrisy with every day that passes.
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So for me, sports is nothing more, and nothing less, than one of this country’s most valuable tools of both mind control, and White supremacy.  I’ve heard people speak of “healthy competition,”  but there’s no such thing as healthy competition; we’ve only been brainwashed into believing in such a ridiculous concept. Competition by its very nature is based on conflict and division, so the only mature and constructive form of competition is when we compete against the person we were the day before.
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So this Colin Kaepernick controversy represents a Rosa Parks moment in our history. It may represent one of the last chances for all true Americans to come together and standup to the fascist oligarchs who are running this country into the ground.  It may also be our last chance to show these gangsters that even with all of their money, power, and influence, they can’t compete against a fed-up and determined people.  That’s what Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks did, and if they hadn’t, Black people would still be riding on the back of the bus.

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So we must use our intellect to recognize that the primary source of the problems we face today is we have literally THOUSANDS of individual groups fighting individual skirmishes for their own particular form of justice.  But the oligarchs are organized and well funded, so they can swat individual groups like flies.  So what we need is for ALL of the individual human rights groups to come together under one banner (The Human Rights Coalition) and prepare to fight an all-out war (virtual, of course) for the rights of ALL.
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I was listening to Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s Roundtable on the radio this weekend, and I learned that the National Football League is a behemoth organization with nearly unlimited power, so they make the perfect target for a massive economic assault.  The Human Rights Coalition could boycott the NFL and every sponsor and media outlet associated with it to bring it to it’s knees.  If we could do that, it would send a message out to all of America – and more importantly, to all of America’s bought-off politicians –  that the people are fed up, and the fun and games are over.  Thereafter, the skirmishes of all the previously isolated groups could be easily addressed, because we will all be standing together, and we’d have a badly wounded NFL to demonstrate that we mean business.
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So this moment in our history presents us with a very important choice.  Like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King before us, we’ve got to decide whether we’re going to stand together, or bend over one at a time.

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