We can't just give up
The fight for a better world never ends.
Colin Kaepernick became a free agent five years ago. For the first time since his subsequent blackballing, he worked out for an NFL team when he threw for the Raiders last week.
I don’t know how likely it is that the Raiders will sign the now-34-year-old quarterback, whose workout reportedly went well. While Mark Davis spoke out in support of Kaepernick just last month, Josh McDaniels’ comments made it sound like a signing wasn’t imminent. Then again, 1) Derek Carr has an out in his contract next year and 2) his backups are Nick Mullens, Jarrett Stidham, and Chase Garbers (is that a real person?).
I helped cover Kaepernick’s racial injustice protest extensively at SB Nation, both while it was unfolding (and evolving) and after. I know he remains a divisive figure to some, though I think that’s for the wrong reasons. I’m not really here to rehash everyone’s opinion about Kap, because what I want to say isn’t so much about him, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t shoot down one common misconception about Kaepernick’s ability. If you watch his film from 2016, he was still an NFL-caliber quarterback when he became a free agent. Especially if, for context purposes, you look at the names of other quarterbacks who have been signed to a contract since he was last in the league.
Kap has maintained that all he wanted was a chance to prove he could still play, and he’s stayed in game shape these past five years as a result. He got a chance last week, and whether he’s on an NFL roster this season or not, Kaepernick has stayed true to himself this entire time. He’s shown he understands two very important things about standing up for your beliefs and what it means to be a citizen both of the U.S. and the world.
The first is: Never stop fighting.
Trying to make this world a better place is a lifelong commitment. It’s a battle that never truly ends, except if we find ourselves in a Childhood's End scenario where Earth literally disintegrates.
There will be victories along the way, and we should celebrate them. There will be setbacks along the way, and we should be angry about them and grieve for them. But justice is neither a straight line nor always swift, and the work is never done.
In the time since he last played in the NFL, Kaepernick has continued to fight against oppression and has donated millions to charity. His work as an activist never stopped even when his quarterback career did.
Kaepernick was both ahead of his time and a product of history. He was not the first athlete to silently protest, but Kap’s actions in 2016 inspired others to join him. Years later, we still see sports figures using the national anthem to bring attention to societal ills, most recently when Giants manager Gabe Kapler decided he’ll stay off the field before games, at least until he feels “better about the direction of our country.”
“My father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn't. I don't believe it is representing us well right now," Kapler wrote, three days after a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school.
It was the third mass shooting in just over a week and the 213th in 2022 alone. Guns are now the leading cause of death for young people in America. This is not who we should be as a country, but it is who we are right now.
It’s so easy to become despondent in what feels like at least five straight years of never-ending gut punches. When you hop on social media, it’s impossible to avoid the echo chamber of doom, filled with defeatist talk of America being a failed experiment:
Don’t mistake nihilism for wisdom, though.
I don’t consider myself an optimist about the current state of this country and its future. In fact, I’m terrified. It feels like the fabric of our democracy is hanging by a thread. We’ve experienced an attempted coup (one that could succeed next time), and the combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering seems like this minority rule — one in which two presidents who did not win the popular vote have been allowed to pick five justices on a 6-3 conservative majority Supreme Court (“fun” fact about that sixth one: his wife tried to get the most recent presidential election overturned) — will only get worse. We can’t even get policy passed on issues a majority of Americans agree on — common sense gun control, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, universal health care, raising the minimum wage, climate change action. Or worse, we’re going backwards on them.
That doesn’t mean I’m pessimistic either. I’m worried, as I think we all should be. I also don’t think my greatest fears are the inevitable outcome. They will be, though, once we believe that and quit trying.
It’s been a week since the Uvalde school shooting, about when these tragedies start to fade from the headlines and the initial rage and heartbreak start to dissipate ever so slightly.
We can’t let it. We owe that much to the children who died while attending school in Uvalde, the shoppers who died while getting their groceries in Buffalo, the churchgoers who died while meeting in Southern California.
And we can’t let the focus be shifted to the coordinated bad-faith responses and their ridiculous “solutions” from gun fetishists and soulless Ted Cruz types.
It’s all a distraction. The problem in this case is simple: guns and how easy it is for them to be obtained.
And the solution is simple: make it harder for them to be obtained.
I know that a majority of my fellow citizens want change in our nation’s gun policy. There are plenty of places we can start: banning assault weapons, raising the age requirement for purchasing a gun, universal background checks. These are all popular ideas! It does not mean your hunting rifle and the pistol that once belonged to your grandpappy will be seized by the government, but it does mean not everyone — such as those with a history of threatening women — should have a gun, especially one that can turn human bone into dust like the one legally purchased by the Uvalde shooter.
To get those laws implemented, and because of the system we currently have, it requires collaboration and compromise. And it’ll take work and time. But please don’t let the lack of a quick fix deter you from trying. The families of the Sandy Hook victims are still trying. So are the Parkland survivors.
It can be hard to know where to even start. We can vote and encourage others to vote, but even that only does so much.
That brings us back to Kap for a second. Because the second truth about America that Kaepernick understands is that sometimes you have to disrupt things to change the status quo.
Those demonstrations, peaceful as they are, are often met with resistance and complaints about a lack of decorum, as we saw when Beto O’Rourke confronted Texas Governor Greg Abbott during a press conference about the Uvalde shooting.
As Roxane Gay wrote in a New York Times op-ed:
When politicians talk about civility and public discourse, what they’re really saying is that they would prefer for people to remain silent in the face of injustice. They want marginalized people to accept that the conditions of oppression are unalterable facts of life. They want to luxuriate in the power they hold, where they never have to compromise, never have to confront their consciences or lack thereof, never have to face the consequences of their inaction.
Most of us don’t have the same platform as Beto, but we can urge other politicians to follow his lead and demand action. We can annoy them:
We can donate and campaign for those who are willing to fight for change. We can participate in protests. We can stay informed and involved in our community. We can use the platforms that we do have, even if that simply means challenging friends and family when they repeat the same old “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” talking points I’ve been hearing since Columbine, or even if it means using your newsletter about the NFL as a Trojan Horse to discuss America’s gun problem.
Next time, I promise more NFL content. But this time, I promise you that I won’t give up, and I hope you won’t either.
Thank you for sharing your insight!
Never give up.