Ex-NFLer Tillman laid down life so players could be free to kneel
Kneeling, be it on one knee or two, is how many of us in this country exercise our freedom of religion, a right guaranteed to us by the Constitution and symbolized by that billowing field of stars and stripes.
Kneeling is also how former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick registered his anger over the deaths of young black males by police in several major cities.
He dropped to one knee and bowed his head as the national anthem was being played. Soon, players across the NFL were “taking a knee” in solidarity with Kaepernick’s expression of conscience.
Long before Colin Kaepernick was born, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medal winners respectively in the 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, both raised black-gloved fists on the medal stand as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played.
It was their attempt to draw attention to racial strife that plagued the country and cost Martin Luther King his life. Both runners were vilified, kicked off the Olympic team and their black power salute was deemed to be treasonous.
Friday night in Alabama, Colin Kaepernick, who is not playing in the NFL at the moment, became the latest in a long line of Donald Trump’s convenient lightening rods. Trump singled him out as one of those “sons of bitches” making millions and “disrespecting our flag.”
Of course, The Donald couldn’t stop there. Yesterday, he retweeted: “NFL player Pat Tillman joined the US Army in 2002. He was killed in action in 2004. He fought for 4our country/freedom.”
Yes indeed, Pat Tillman gave up his million-dollar gig with the Arizona Cardinals to become a U.S. Army Ranger after 9/11. But what the president either forgot to mention, or was too ignorant to know, is that Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire.
This tragic fact was made even worse when the U.S. Army kept it quiet from Tillman’s family for more than a month.
Pat Tillman’s brother, Kevin, served with him in Afghanistan. Four years after Pat died, Kevin wrote a heartfelt but seething essay that laid waste to all the empty platitudes and myths the Army tried to use to promote a conflict that continues to this day.
“Somehow,” Kevin Tillman wrote, “faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated. Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated. Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma and nonsense. Somehow, a narrative is more important than reality.
“Somehow, being politically informed, diligent and skeptical has been replaced by active ignorance.”
Kevin Tillman could have written that today instead of 10 years ago. He could have written it about Donald J. Trump.
To read those words is to know that what Pat Tillman of the Arizona Cardinals and the Army Rangers chose to lay down his life for was the freedom for Colin Kaepernick to drop to one knee and respectfully exercise his Constitutional right to call attention to a world beyond the sidelines.