I am beyond exhausted and pretty cranky, so I really shouldn't dive into this dialog again. But here I am. *sigh*
Speaking on behalf of myself at the very least, I want to make one thing so absolutely clear. As a person who is "bothered" by these "protests" I am not bothered by the reasoning behind the "protests" I am bothered by the means. Yes racism exists. Yes it is an atrocity. But in my mind to protest during the National Anthem about police brutality is akin to protesting drunk driving in front of the Marlboro factory.
In any given week there are four hours set aside for football and 168 hours for everything else. Within that four hour football window is +/- 2:00 minutes for the National Anthem.
Do you really mean to tell me that two minutes is the absolute optimum time to enact true effective change. I am not talking about making a statement.
Bumper stickers make statements. Do you know what that is? A statement, that and a buck fifty will buy you a cup of coffee.
I am more impressed with people who make a change, rather than those who make a statement.
Other than division, what change is taking place by kneeling during the National Anthem ?
I disagree. I think sports is a good venue for instigating discussions and keeping topics at the forefront of the public consciousness. People's instincts are to brush uncomfortable topics aside and until they get inconvenienced themselves very little actually gets done.
Muhammad Ali using his platform as a conscientious objector is a good example. He was a prominent athlete who used his platform to voice his thoughts about the Vietnam War and the way African-Americans were being treated. Or the Black Power salute in 1968.
But the example that springs to mind for me as a NZer is the Springbok tours of the 1980s. South Africa's rugby side toured here, but there were hugely intense divisions about whether the country should let them in because of the Apartheid government. In the end the games went ahead but protestors ended up demonstrating in the streets and trying to get the games cancelled - succeeding in getting one game called off because of how intense things got. The fallout was that a return tour to South Africa got blocked by the courts and the rugby board ended up not organising any tours to or from South Africa until the Apartheid regime was overturned. NZ kinda dragged its feet on this one, but rugby, as South South Africa's most popular sport, became an avenue to put pressure on the South African government. I'm sure many white South Africans (irrespective of what they thought of Apartheid) would have felt that the politics should be left out of sports, but in retrospect I'd say everyone agrees that it didn't hurt them as a comfortable majority (in power terms) to be inconvenienced for a little bit by not being able to watch their rugby side in action.
Likewise, racism and police brutality are topics that have been allowed to simmer away for ever because unless you live those experiences it's very easy to turn the topic off and ignore it for another day, and then nothing changes. If you're sick of hearing about it, a lot of these guys are sick of living it. And at least we can turn the NFL off and the issue doesn't affect us anymore. That's why a lot of these riots have gotten to the point of some really toxic nastiness - I don't condone killing officers by any stretch but it shows the frustration and helplessness that's been allowed to fester for years (without condoning a lot of those actions I can at least understand where it's coming from). Even if kneeling for the anthems doesn't explicitly bring about change, it's at least brought those genuine issues you mentioned to the forefront where they'd otherwise get swept under the rug.
As for practical solutions to the problem (and it's good that a few have been brought up here already - it shows that the protests are having at least some impact) that everyone should be able to agree on:
*Punish the bad officers for being bad officers. The Utah officer who harassed the Utah nurse when he was clearly in the wrong getting paid leave was bullshit. The guy who killed Philando Castille getting off scot-free when the whole thing on camera shows the system is broken. Instead you get this system where it's easier for officers to dodge charges and they end getting paid leave or rotated somewhere else after something goes wrong, and everyone wonders why there are these cyclical tensions. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that simply punishing the bad officers, and doing so publicly, would at least be a first step in restoring public faith in the police, as well as being a win for the good officers who don't have the troglodytes reflecting badly on them anymore.
*Reallocate a good amount of federal funding to local police forces. The Ferguson police department got 14% of its revenue in 2013 from fines and forfeiture, up from 7% in 2013. That sounds fine in theory, but making fines an increasingly vital part of police funding starts to mess with incentives (and it's worth stressing that this isn't any one person's fault), especially when the fines are for pretty miniscule things, like how two people in Arizona got jail time for not trimming weeds that had exceeded six inches, or a guy in Ferguson who was resting in his car after a basketball game and got fined for not wearing a seatbelt in his (parked) car and for making a false declaration after giving an abbreviated version of his name. If an extra $12 billion is going to build the wall, wouldn't it be better to allocate that money to local police departments so they're not under that kind of pressure to generate revenue from petty violations? And if the wall is an absolute must-have (I'm not convinced the benefits outweigh the costs but whatever) surely there's gotta be money from somewhere.
