THIS NATIONAL ANTHEM CONTROVERSY…
(was a media generated one because it gave one individual’s agenda a grandstanding play)

Much of the public furor about a football celebrity’s refusal to stand when the national anthem was played would not have occurred if the media hounds, which are always looking for something to yelp about, had not given him their attention because of his action.

Had they ignored it, Mr. Kaepernick would never have had the opportunity to vent his somewhat distorted viewpoint in public. While he has a perfect right to such views, and to use such a means to express them, everyone else has the same right to simply ignore it, as their way of protesting what they think of his posture about these.

This national anthem controversy was a media generated one because it gave one individual’s agenda a grandstanding play. The media’s post-game questions to him about his action thus gave him the opportunity he wanted to publicize his viewpoints. Viewpoints it should be noted he seems to have only recently developed. Such a sudden display of “activism” has a hint of being a manufactured one…rather than being a sincere conversion for a so-called cause.

There’s no denying there are a lot of problems with the way some our police forces operate in this country (the latest episode in Oklahoma is a good example of that), but for a greater percentage of time these display the highest level of professionalism and integrity, while facing extremely dangerous and stressful situations on a daily basis.

What too many people ignore, by their knee-jerk emotional reactions about police actions, is the context in which these occur. They never consider several very critical factors involved… what brought individuals involved to police attention in the first place…and what triggered the need for police to use force, including deadly force, in the second place. While there is no question that some individual officers do have a racial or ethnic bias, the greatest majority of them do not, so if they have to apply force to perform their sworn duty, it’s solely because the situation requires it…not such bias.

Mr. Kaepernick, and others like him, need to look much deeper into these aspects before coming to the blanket judgments that all police are simply thugs with a license to brutalize or kill. They might also consider how to answer this over riding question: What do they reasonably expect the police to do when faced with either hostility or violent resistance while attempting to enforce the law?

CENTURION