Thoughts of My Generation Brought to Light by a Cartoon About a Quarterback

by Ernie McCray

A high school classmate of mine likes to share his MAGA influenced leanings on my Facebook timeline.

Like the other day he sent me a meme with Colin Kaepernick saying “I’m kneeling to protest injustice against Black men in America!”

In the moment I read that I couldn’t help but glow inside, so grateful for this new generation of freedom fighters.

Then, a cartoon character, Charlie Brown, says “That’s odd. You joined Islam, a religion that still owns black slaves, and you don’t protest against that.”

To me that’s like society, to use football jargon, making a quarterback sack. Man makes a plea, in behalf of a people still trying to be free, and we just blitz him with ridicule and scorn and make it more and more unlikely that he’ll ever throw a pass again, something he was born to do and loves to do. Something he, before he took a knee, had been having a great time doing.

How inhumane is that?

And it bothers me that an old classmate of mine is down with that and it makes me wonder about people in our age range.

Like it blew my mind when I found out over half of us had voted for Donald J. Trump, #45 – because he goes against the grain of how we were raised when we were growing up in the 40’s and 50’s.

I mean we were taught not to lie and to be respectful of others but we support a president who can’t open his mouth without weaving a false tale and he shamelessly mocks people with disabilities and relentlessly bullies people with whom he disagrees and gleefully thinks it’s cool to grab women indecently.

We grew up saying “Yes sir and no sir and yes and no ma’am” and “Thank you, you’re welcome, excuse me and please” and we covered our mouths when we sneezed – but we have a president who is ill at ease with any form of niceties, known to have pushed aside other world dignitaries so he could be seen.

We’re backing an inconsiderate man who has not an ounce of humility, a man with not a single redeeming quality, someone who can lump loving people with the KKK and Nazis, a person who’s a legend in his own mind and the “best ever” at most everything in his own mind and a “great leader” in his own mind, a narcissistic prima donna who thinks of himself and nobody else as he lives by an Un-Golden Rule of “doing onto others whatever he wants to do.”

And what he wants to do and does is hurt others. In any way he can. If he thinks you’re a Muslim he’ll make life miserable for you in the TSA line at the airport.

If he owes you for work you did for him, he’ll stiff you, sue you.

If you’re running for your life seeking asylum, he’ll separate you from your children and put them in cages.

If you have a job you like he’ll take it away and badmouth, malign, discredit and/or ignore you and glory in your pain.

If you do his dirty work aka all his work and get busted and jailed he’ll claim he doesn’t know you and throw you under the bus.

What good does he do for any of us?

And I really can’t wrap my head around how we, with all the hysteria in our day about the “C” word, communism, can be comfortable with him cozying up, like a groupie trying to get the attention of a rock star, to Vladimir Putin, a man who has communism in his DNA.

Have we forgotten all the lives Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined by accusing people of being communists who were disloyal to the country and charging them with engaging in subversive activities and, in the process, suppressing their basic civil rights and liberties?

How, in the world, does it not bother us that Putin, formerly of Russia’s KGB, which is notorious for committing horrible atrocities against humanity, has tampered with our elections and still is, and is stepping into places where we were, assuming power we once had?

How can we be more rattled by a black NFL quarterback bringing attention to the social and political plight of his people than we are about a president who toys with treason?

Do we not understand that when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee for what is right he’s being very American and when Trump aids and abets a mortal enemy he’s being extremely Un-American?

Have we not considered that when we let a president get away with political malfeasance we’re betraying not only much of our upbringing but also our duty to leave the children of the world, our descendants, a hope inspiring legacy created by our wisdom, our eldership in our society, our experiences, over time, in our leg of human history, of discerning good from bad, right from wrong?

I guess not. We, apparently, no matter all the positive sounding manners and mores that governed our day, weren’t called the “Silent Generation” for nothing.

But thank goodness the younger generations I’ve been observing as I get around, and I do get around, don’t think like my era, as they seem, to me, to be inching closer and closer to what we didn’t devote enough time to: honoring the ideals of “liberty and justice for all.”

That’s all Colin is asking for.

Not our ridicule.