The Wild Reed: Quote of the Day

Monday, November 13, 2017

Quote of the Day

Gentlemen's Quarterly is not typically the defining mechanism of a man's work. At least it shouldn't be, not by my narrow concept of what is still a predominantly style-based magazine.

But when it named Colin Kaepernick its Citizen Of The Year, as told in the words of other admiring celebrity mavens, it recalibrated a lot of things we have taken for granted.

Like conscience. He had one. He exercised it at considerable personal cost and became a national touchstone on the real beginning of the new century. He put a cleaver to our national pretense of "one country" and made it plain that football isn't meant to be the be-all and end-all of a football player's life. A man must have a code, after all, and human decency for all under an umbrella of America-as-it-ought-to-be is his.

But his code was revealed in rejecting football (or actually, having it reject him), and while the national tide has swirled around him, he also helped reveal the slowly but discernibly rotting underpinnings of the National Football League which is responding to all this external struggle by eating itself. The NFL's power and resources are vast, so the cannibalism will take a decade and likely more, but it is happening right where everyone can see.

. . . Kaepernick decided one man's voice wasn't too small, and one man's platform wasn't too rickety.

And he wasn't even going after football. He was going after social inequity and cruelties, the way a good citizen should.