American Freedom & Football...A Kaepernick Story

In a recent Facebook posting, this is what I had to say regarding the Colin Kaepernick exercise of free speech and protest. 

"Now please allow me to say something...

The football QB known as Colin Kaeprrnick made and continues to make a stand for what he believes and has every right to voice his opinion and launch his protest by every peaceful means of a free society in which he lives. 

Many people have said that because he is a person that earns millions of dollars and is Black that he is somehow exempt from being able to protest....Others have said that his wallet proves that racism does not exist in America. What we hear when that is said is ample proof of the hypocrisy that we have accepted as Americans when it comes to fairness, equality, money and Black exceptionalism. 

When such sentiments are invoked it is clearly a throwback to the slave/master mentality. Should a Black man not protest because he has 40 acres and a mule? Should Black exceptionalism remove blocks of successful Black men and women from the struggle and liberation of them that are suffering? 

To believe that is to believe that money buys equality and further that money should buy silence. This is the root of slavery. This is the philosophical construct of the slave master. For the trade of money the person is purchased to sit silently and be who we tell him that he is...His name is TOBY...we have demanded his identity to be reconstructed to our liking...this is the American hypocrisy that he is protesting. Not the military or good police and what works in society. He protests what is wrong in society and given life and strength by our hypocrisy and failure to act upon what we know should be addressed. 

Most times the White wealthy are unopposed in dissent of any fashion and are understood to represent an "honorable" cause. So much so until a nation (America) that dishonored the flag of another (Great Britain) taking land that was not theirs (What we call America now), wealthy and poor working together were called PATRIOTS, pioneers and exemplary Americans. 

Yet today, they burn jerseys of an athlete that has paid for his place with bumps, bruises, and all sorts of other injuries and an insurmountable amount of time and pain that none of his critics care to mention. He has run every play, followed the rules for free while others earned millions off of his success. 

Remember the "owners"? They traded or what we call "contracted" to give him money but they too made insurmountable dollars off of the talents he honed and developed over the years. They only contributed after the fact. In any sense none of their contribution included taking away of his personal freedoms? Or do we now say that payments (ie: money & salaries) now strip individuals of their freedom? If so, that is the essence of slavery is it not? 

No, I have no regard for the BLM movement but I have every regard for a free man's right to dissent, not based on what he has done in the past, but what he has come to stand for and believe now. 

For those, all of those, to call him un-American is to affirm that the flag is nothing more than a sham. If the flag cannot guarantee his right of dissent then it certainly cannot provide his freedom. 

I say listen to the young man. He may be saying something that many of us if not all of us have known for generations...only something GOOD is worth fighting for!

I am Pastor Harvey Burnett, God gave me my freedom and I approved this message.

Blessed!