San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler’s respect for the United States is conditional, and he wants you to know it. Kapler announced Friday: “I don’t plan on coming out for the anthem going forward until I feel better about the direction of our country. That’ll be the step. I don’t expect it to move the needle necessarily. It’s just something I feel strongly enough about to take that step.” Kapler is angry about the Uvalde shooting, and he won’t be satisfied with the direction of our country until the government takes away the guns from those Americans who might have prevented that shooting.
In a post on his website, KapLifestyle, entitled “Home of the Brave?,” Kapler explained: “When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn’t. I don’t believe it is representing us well right now.” He noted that he had stood for the anthem on the day of the shooting, and lamented: “I am not okay with the state of this country. I wish I hadn’t let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this.”
Kapler added: “I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents. We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the ‘shining city on the hill.’” On that, he is one hundred percent correct: we elect representatives and instead, we get corrupt, self-serving kleptocrats who keep feeding at the public trough long into their dotage. But they aren’t the people Kapler has in mind.
What Kapler wants is a disarmed citizenry, and he’s withholding his patriotism until he gets it. He excoriated the “thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings. We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn.” How those who engage in the “mass slaughter of human beings” will be stopped in Kapler’s world, he didn’t bother to say.
America’s decline in recent years can be plotted in the descent from Rick Monday to Gabe Kapler. On April 25, 1976, two protesters ran into the outfield at Dodger Stadium and started trying to set fire to an American flag, but Chicago Cubs center fielder Rick Monday ran up and snatched the flag away. Rick Monday wasn’t acting as a Democrat or as a Republican, or in favor of or against any particular policies; he was acting as an American. He may have been “not okay with the state of this country” in many ways, and anyone would have been or should have been with the dark days of Carter on the horizon, but he didn’t let that stop him.
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Monday gave an insight into why he acted when he was asked in 2016 what he thought of Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the National Anthem.
“I was shocked,” Monday said. “The question is why? Why? He has his own issues. He has his own beliefs. And many of us have our own that are totally opposite of that. I don’t like it, and I don’t respect it. It is dishonoring the flag and the people who served our country.”
Indeed. And so is Kapler’s grandstanding now. Kapler is demanding government bans on various weapons as a condition of his demonstrating his allegiance to this country, but there is no record of his ever registering his disgust with his country over the hate-filled black nationalism that led to the murder of six people in Waukesha, Wisc. and the shooting of ten in Brooklyn. Clearly, some mass murders and attempted mass murders are more equal than others, and only some of them require a public display of moral indignation.
Kapler also pointed out that “this particular time, an 18 year old walked into a store, bought multiple assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, walked into a school with an armed resource officer and its own police district and was able to murder children for nearly an hour. Parents begged and pleaded with police officers to do something, police officers who had weapons and who receive nearly 40% of the city’s funding, as their children were being murdered.” So is Kapler not going to stand for the anthem because police were cowardly? It’s hard to see how disarming law-abiding citizens would have given the police more spine. Maybe Kapler can explain that at his next self-serving and self-congratulatory press conference.
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