TAKING A KNEE
For the spoiled overpaid professional athletes in the NFL and NBA who hate America and want to make a political statement against the police who risk their lives to protect us every day taking a knee during out national anthem is an acceptable form of protest. To me and other American veterans and active members of the active military it is totally unacceptable. In fact, it is the ultimate insult.
For us taking a knee is what we do to honor our fallen comrades. There is the iconic image, now immortalized in a statue of a grieving soldier taking a knee in front of a pair of military boots and an inverted rifle with a helmet on its butt. Originally, the inverted rifle and helmet was used by American soldiers to alert the teams that retrieved dead soldiers of their locations. The rifle with a bayonet was stuck in the ground with the helmet of the dead soldier and his dog tags so they could be identified.
Preferably it was at the head of the shallow grave the soldier was buried in, but often in the heat of combat there was no time for burial so it was to mark the site of the unburied body. So for us, taking a knee is a way of expressing our grief for a dead comrade, and our respect for the reasons that they died. Most of the elitist players of the NFL have never seen or heard of this act of respect in the military, or if they have don’t understand its meaning, or don’t care.
In the case of Colin Kaepernick who started this, he is kneeling because he hates our country and wants to pay homage to his real heroes, Fidel Castro who brutalized and oppressed the people of Cuba for decades, and Che Guevara. Guevara was an especially brutal terrorist, whose specialty was leading his men into unarmed towns, executing all of the men and boys, and then raping the women and girls before murdering them. This has made him a hero of ignorant members of the left like Kaepernick.
I am not a sports star, millionaire, or Hollywood elitist although I have been many things in my life. I have been a lawyer, a teacher, a public speaker, a published author, a freelance writer, and a radio talk show host. None of that sets me above any other hard working American who believes in God and out country. However, those things are what I have done, not who I am. Who I was, still am, and always will be is an American soldier. This means that I will always stand at attention and salute when the National Anthem is played, and I will kneel and pray when I attend the funeral of one of my fellow soldiers.
However, unless there is a drastic change I will never watch another NFL game or ever buy any products or services pushed by its sponsors.
Michael Connelly