Brandon Marshall was afraid this would happen.
Marshall is a former NFL linebacker and a longtime friend of Colin Kaepernick, whom you know as a 49ers quarterback-turned-activist.
In 2016 Kaepernick, Marshall, and dozens of other NFL players had an agenda. They took a knee before their respective games. It was a plea. A call to a cause. A warning.
And did they and the others ever take a white-hot ration of outrage for their trouble.
“Back then, we were called rogues, people said that we didn’t deserve jobs, but this is what we were talking about then,” Marshall said to ESPN on Monday.
“I think people are looking at (Kaepernick) now like, ‘OK, maybe he knew.’ People didn’t want to hear the message after, ‘Oh, they were kneeling.’ They didn’t want that message, weren’t ready for it, didn’t listen.”
Now look around.
Kaepernick was doused with vitriol and shouted down. He was invited by the president of the United States to go live somewhere else.
“There’s been a lot of talk of how horrible the rioting and looting is,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said in a recent interview with ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt. “That is no way to demonstrate, but people should think about the fact that Colin Kaepernick tried to demonstrate peacefully. What did he get? He got ostracized and lost his job. He was blackballed. That was a peaceful protest about an issue that is very real, and no one could acknowledge that.”
Kaepernick’s message four years ago wasn’t just ignored. It was scorned, because people cling dearly to their politics, their religion and their sensibilities however well considered. And because no one back then could imagine the hellscape confronting us right now.
“We have to get to the point where we take these people seriously and acknowledge the wrongs that they are trying to identify and right them,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “That’s the way that we make progress.”
That is tough sledding. Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers isn’t wrong when he says that the looting, the violence, the anger, “was decades in the making.”
And Marshall is spot-on when he says, “it’s a people thing, not just a black and brown thing. You see people taking to the streets, it’s a mixed crowd. It’s not just black people. It’s everybody. That is what it takes for change. Everybody has to care about it.
“Back then, not everybody cared about it.”
Kaepernick cared about it. The NFL, not so much. It has spent ridiculous amounts of time and money trying to marginalize and discredit Kaepernick’s message and defend itself from his collusion grievance. Saturday the league published a message of its own on Twitter. It reads in part:
“The NFL family is greatly saddened by the tragic events across our country. The protesters’ reactions to these incidents reflects the pain, anger and frustration that so many of us feel.
“As current events dramatically underscore, there remains much more to do as a country and a league. There remains an urgency for action.”
Too bad the NFL spent much of the fall of 2016 losing its mind over the kneeling protesters. Colin Kaepernick could have hooked the league up with all the urgency for action it could’ve handled.
