NEW YORK — It’s beginning to look like there’s a side benefit to the President Donald Trump attack on the NFL over the anthem. Eleven NFL owners and 13 players met inside a conference room on the sixth floor of the NFL office in midtown Manhattan for more than three hours Tuesday morning, and when it was over, one owner said it was the best dialog he’d ever experienced with players.
“I would say the same thing,” Atlanta owner Arthur Blank said Tuesday night, outside the hotel in lower Manhattan where the owners convened for their annual fall meeting. “I told [commissioner] Roger Goodell this, and I said it to all the owners this afternoon—I thought this was one of the most open and productive meetings I’ve been in, maybe ever, in any business I’ve been involved with. And I’m 75 years old. The players we met with today were deeply emotional and knowledgeable about the issues they’re passionate about. The owners listened, and I thought the owners responded with the same kind of passion.”
The owners made it clear on the first day of the two-day meeting that there won’t be an anthem policy set forth by the league. Essentially, the owners know that even though they’d like all players who suit up each week to stand at attention for the anthem, ordering them to do so would result in the same kind of civil disobedience that the Trump speech Sept. 22 in Huntsville, Ala., prompted. One of the players in the meeting Tuesday, 49ers safety Eric Reid, said he would continue to kneel for the anthem. So if the league is trying to show players they want to support their social-justice causes, the worst way would have been to say: We’ll support your causes, but you all have to stand for us to do that. That would have continued the distrust and bad feeling between top levels of the NFL and the NFL Players Association that has plagued the Roger Goodell reign.
https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/10/17/nfl-owners-players-meeting-national-anthem-stand
What the players need to articulate is kneeling is a STATEMENT not a PROTEST. Its the same statement John Carlos and Tommie Smith made at the 72 Olympics.
this is a statement on the world stage about how those two feel about American society and its treatment of Black people.
Kaepernick's statement is about racism and police brutality. Its not about disrespecting vets, or defying trump its about people who are as much citizens as anyone else in the country yet being made to feel like we're not.
Police brutality is more than just shooting incidences. It encompasses treatment and conduct from cops toward civilians. Something that law enforcement has had a long bad history of with the black community.
Its not enough to say their are some "bad apples" but the majority are good. if the good ones tolerate the bad ones then nothing changes. The black community is constantly told we need to clean up our own neighborhoods but the police community is never told to do the same. If there is a person with a badge and gun patrolling a neighborhood, the residents of which he thinks are subhuman, that community is going to have a problem.
So when bad police get away with brutality its under the flag. When cops violate citizens rights its under the flag. When politicians make laws that will affect certain groups more than others its under the flag. When you have to fight and blood has to be shed just to be treated like a full citizen in your country of birth its under the flag. So when a community is told their grievances are not valid and they're on their own its a sign of disrespect so why should the members of that community show respect to the flag of the country and society that has repeatedly shown disrespect to them?
The athletes themselves need to articulate this better to the media.
Last edited:
