When Colin Kaepernick knelt on a football field to call attention to disparate treatment and unnecessary deaths of blacks by some law enforcement, there was outrage, especially on social media, about the inappropriateness and disrespect in his protest.
When a Congressman and minister ended a prayer before Congress with “amen/awoman”, a playful pun meant as a nod to a record number of women (144) taking office in Congress this term, and to the first female House chaplain being appointed, there were cries that the “Radical Left” are ruining our country.
Yet when Americans stormed the Capitol yesterday, pushing past police and into Senate chambers and offices to disrupt the certification of election results with the intention of demanding that those results be overturned, there was largely silence from those so distraught by a knee and a pun.
“No More Bullshit” flags hung in my community, in many communities, for months prior to the election.
On numerous occasions before November, Trump claimed without evidence that widespread mail-in voting would mean a fraudulent election, and many times, including to a rally of supporters in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in August, he said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
After Biden’s win was made official by Congress last night, Trump said he will leave office on Jan. 20, in the same breath that he again expressed that the election was stolen from him, despite any evidence.
I find it interesting that so many “Pray for our nation” signs suddenly went up after Biden won the election. Shouldn’t the praying have been happening for our nation all along—no matter the leader, or the election results?
Subtleties, after a while, take on all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Our divisions are strong. We saw yesterday where unchecked words and actions over time can lead.
I hope Trump fulfills his words in two weeks by stepping aside for his successor. And I hope we’re learning how vital a role we ordinary citizens play in a transfer of power being peaceful, and a nation moving on, by our actions and words every day.
In early September, former Bengals tight end Tyler Eifert announced that he would choose to honor the memory of David Dorn, a retired St. Louis police captain who was killed in June of this year.
Christopher Ball is a longtime Loveland resident and an attorney
Eifert was selected by the Bengals in the first round of the 2013 NFL Draft and played his first seven seasons in Cincinnati. He recently signed a 2-year $9.5 million deal with the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he hopes to make a comeback after several injury-plagued seasons with the Bengals.
The NFL’s new stance is a stark reversal from its prior positions. In 2016 the league refused to allow Dallas Cowboys players to wear decals to honor five police officers killed by a sniper in downtown Dallas. Even Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys, felt that allowing players to put unique messages on their helmets or wear pink to honor cancer survivors, would open “Pandora’s Box’ that would be difficult to ultimately control. In 2013 Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall was fined for wearing green shoes to highlight issues surrounding mental health.
Whatever you may think of his opinions, Colin Kaepernick’s visible on-field protests against systemic racism and police violence are unquestionably a large part of the reason that he is no longer playing football. Prior to 2020, it was clear that the National Football League was doing all that it could to keep politics, protests, and uniform variance out of its brand.
Now that has all changed.
Roger Goodell has admitted that both he and the league were wrong for not listening to protesting players sooner. The new decal initiative is the National Football League’s attempt to, at least in part, allow its players to express their non-football opinions on the field, while they are at work, doing their jobs. While the new rules were ultimately put in place to allow players to place decals on their helmets “bearing names or initials of victims of systemic racism and police violence” Eifert’s choice sends a different message, one very similar to those of the 2016 Dallas Cowboys. Eifert himself has a long history of supporting military and first responders during his career, and so his choice to honor David Dorn is not surprising.
What will be interesting to see is whether the league will allow him to wear a decal honoring Dorn even though, by most standards, the slain police captain is not a “victim of systemic racism or police violence.” Early reports suggest that the players will be allowed to pick from an approved list of names, with options such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. While the NFL has not officially released its policy on decals, nor have they provided the complete list of names from which its players can choose, Eifert’s decision to honor Dorn is one that will no doubt spark debate on the boundaries of the NFL’s new policy.
Whether it opens Pandora’s box, as Jerry Jones once feared, is yet to be seen.
LOVELAND MOM’S LONG RACIAL AWARENESS JOURNEY AND WHY WHITE AMERICANS NEED TO FOLLOW HER PATH
by Daniel P. Finney
Kristi Kinne-Hayes grew up in Jefferson, a Green County, Iowa city made of 4,200 almost all white people. Kristi played six-on-six girls’ basketball and became one of the best players in the state.
A Guest Column by Independent journalist Daniel P. Finney who writes for paragraphstacker.com
She knew local police officers by their first names and thought of them as just another face in the crowd rather than law enforcement.
Kristi played college basketball at Drake University, leading the Bulldogs to an NCAA Tournament berth her senior season in 1995. She seldom thought about race even though she played alongside and was friends with people of different races.
She had a longtime friend who played softball at Drake who was mixed race and never knew until someone asked her friend about her race in a Kansas City bar.
But life, love and motherhood changed her perspective and her long journey from racial indifference, maybe even racial ignorance, to awareness and empathy is one all Americans — especially whites — need to take right now.
A background like Kristi’s makes it seem unlikely that she would comment on the ghastly death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. But life, love and motherhood changed her perspective and her long journey from racial indifference, maybe even racial ignorance, to awareness and empathy is one all Americans — especially whites — need to take right now.
Kristi graduated from Drake, survived ovarian cancer and met and married Jonathan Hayes, a former University of Iowa tight end who played for the legendary Hayden Fry during the famed coach’s revitalization of the program in the early 1980s.
Hayes is also African-American. But a mixed-race relationship didn’t expose Kristi to the racial hatred the corrupts America’s soul.
The first time Kristi brought Johnathan home to Jefferson to watch a ballgame, fans swarmed the Hawkeye hero for autographs.
“That was so traumatic for me because when I was at the game, people came up for my autograph,” Kristi said. “I told Jonathan they only wanted his autograph because they already had mine.”
The couple settled in Cincinnati, where Jonathan served as tight ends coach for the NFL’s Bengals.
They had four children. Yet it wasn’t until their eldest daughter, the couple’s second child, turned 16 that evil racism finally struck the mother of four mixed-race children.
Kristi and Jonathan bought a new car and gave their older vehicle to their daughter. They put the old plates on their daughter’s vehicle and paid the fees, but Ohio Department of Transportation computers hadn’t yet processed the transaction.
One evening their daughter came home pale.
She said, ‘I was sure they were going to shoot me.
Kristi asked her what was wrong.
She had been pulled over by police. The car tags were wrong.
“She said, ‘I was sure they were going to shoot me,’” Kristi said. “I thought, ‘Why would you think they would shoot you?’”
And the privilege of being a white star athlete from small town Iowa evaporated. She was now the mother of four children whose facial characteristics most white people would identify as black.
“If there’s a little bit of brown, to other white people, you’re black,” Kristi said.
Living with racism did not limit her children’s success. Eldest son, Jaxson Hayes, was a first-round draft pick by the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans last year.
Daughter Jillian is a highly prized women’s basketball recruit committed to the University of Cincinnati.
Jillian Hayes and her family on the night she accepted her commemorative 1,000th point ball.
Kristi reminds them that she doesn’t care if other people label them black only, just remember that their white mother and her family loves them just as much as their African-American father and his family.
“Your name is clean,” Kristi tells her kids, “keep it that way.”
Still, she worries. Jaxson is off in New Orleans, just turned 20 years old and having the time of his life as an NBA rookie despite the league shutdown due to coronavirus.
She tells her children that if they are pulled over, put their hands at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the steering wheel.
“I never thought I would have to tell my children that,” Kristi said.
The true horror of this event: None of those officers moved to stop their fellow officer from committing a crime. It was depraved indifference.
Kristi saw the news reports and videos of a Minneapolis police officer putting his knee in the back of George Floyd, an African-American man suspected of forgery.
Three other police officers stood by and did nothing. They were all fired. As of this writing, it’s unknown if they will be criminally charged.
The killing of Floyd is a complete institutional failure by the Minneapolis police. That officer pressed his knee into the back of that handcuffed man’s neck as he pleaded for mercy, he could not breath and eventually lost consciousness and died.
He stared into the crowd almost as if he was daring someone to tell him he was wrong. The crowd pleaded with him to render aid, to check Floyd for injury or get him some water.
The officer refused.
A friend of mine made this observation a few years ago: “There’s two things we learned from everybody having cameras on their phone: There are no UFOs and police sometimes kill people for no reason.”
The true horror of this event: None of those officers moved to stop their fellow officer from committing a crime. It was depraved indifference.
Here in Des Moines, some of my police sources told me they were aghast at another cop so drunk on power that his defiance led to the death of a man.
“When you have him in cuffs, get him up and in a car and off to the station,” one cop told me. “That diffuses the situation right there.”
Another cop told me police administrators were circulating a video by a top training instructor illustrating the dangers of the knee in the back hold and all Des Moines cops will have to sign off on having watched it.
There’s been little local backlash at Des Moines police because of the Minneapolis killing, but the danger of using national stories to paint local pictures hangs over every police station.
Kristi saw that news and it moved her. She lives in Cincinnati, a city that saw race riots in 2001 after police shot an unarmed African American teenager. Kristi and her family moved to Cincinnati after that terrible period.
So what does all this have to do with Kristi Kinne-Hayes, the great Iowa basketball star?
But motherhood long ago took the woman from Jefferson’s ability to be color blind.
Moved by the story, Kristi posted to her Instagram a trending meme of the officer with his knee in the back of Floyd’s neck and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem. The caption read: “This is why.”
So what does all this have to do with Kristi Kinne-Hayes, the great Iowa basketball star?
ESPN commentator Emmanuel Acho pleaded with white America in a video posted to his Twitter feed Tuesday.
“My white brothers and sisters, we need y’all’s help,” Acho said. African-Americans have been outraged as people continued to die unnecessarily, but white Americans have remained mostly indifferent or hesitant to raise their voice in protest.
We need to take the journey Kristi Kinne-Hayes took in her 46 years. She went from living blind to race because it never directly affected her to having a profound understanding of just how horrible racism is in this country.
I’m not saying you need to repost the meme or start hashtagging everything #blacklivesmatter.
But we must all do our very best to engage empathy for people who are not like us.
It’s very hard for anyone to see life through the perspective of someone who has lived so differently.
Our failure to do that is already too late for so many, the latest being George Floyd.
Daniel P. Finney, independent journalist – Cut loose and cashiered by corporate media, lone paragraph stacker Daniel P. Finney makes his way telling stories about his city, state and nation. No more metrics or Google trends, he writes stories about people and life ignored by the oligarchy. ParagraphStacker.com is reader-supported media. Please consider donating at paypal.me/paragraphstacker.
“We can continue as a nation to sweep problems under the rug on which we stand – or we can take a knee.”
by Steve Link,
HAVE TO SAY THIS: If I thought the NFL protests were a slap in the face to “our soldiers, our police officers, and our veterans” as some have claimed, I’d be right there with those who object.
On Tuesday, October 9 the Press Secretary for our administrative branch of government said, “We support the national anthem, the flag, and the men and women who fought to defend it.”
Well, I was proud to serve in the military. Never in harm’s way, but served on active duty for two years. I was a Drill Sergeant. Most of my …trainees went to Vietnam. They did not fight for a flag.
Our nation’s flag is supposed to denote and identify our great country. IT IS A SYMBOL, NOT AN IDOL. It symbolizes this nation of people and the systems within which we live – including the good and the bad. Certainly, no one salutes the flag to honor what’s wrong in America, but the bad is part of American life just as it is globally.
I can understand some of the confusion surrounding for whom the flag flies. Many Americans believe that the United States is the “greatest nation on earth.” That’s just not so and is, frankly, fake news. The one way in which we ARE far above all other nations is in military strength. So one might confuse the symbolism of our flag as being militaristic. But our flag is certainly not designed to represent any special segment of our citizenry. Most Americans do not serve in the military or law enforcement. Rather, the American flag it is a symbol of equality for all – among other ideals – for which we try to stand as a people. (And “equality for all” is also fake news.)
So, I do not see the NFL players disrespecting any individuals. No, they are trying the best they can to turn our collective attention to problems in our country that are morally abhorrent. I am pleased that some of them have been passionate enough to take risks and draw upon a large audience to make a statement that needs hearing (and seeing).
We can continue as a nation to sweep problems under the rug on which we stand – or we can take a knee.
Christopher Ball is a longtime Loveland resident and an attorney
A Guest Column by Independent journalist Daniel P. Finney who writes for 
