Posted on 09/09/2016 7:02:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Dear Colin Kaepernick,
I hear you. And so do millions across the country. As a professional athlete, you actually have more sway than pastors. Welcome to a culture driven by the worship of sports.
This is why your political statements carry such tremendous weight.
Let me take you back for a moment...
“If you don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, you’re going to get a detention!” threatened my 12th grade Government Studies teacher. She was angry that I refused to say words I felt were untrue.
I was the only one in the class who staged this brief protest. How could I recite words that I knew were a lie—“one nation under God”—we weren’t, and I wasn’t going to pretend it was true. She kept threatening me, but I refused to say it for weeks, not fearing the consequences.
I get you Colin Kaepernick. I understand that frustration with knowing something is wrong and trying to express it in some way.
We have similar backgrounds. You’re biracial. I’m biracial. Both of us had black biological “fathers” who weren’t in the picture at all. (Actually, that’s an understatement for me as my biological mother was raped yet chose life despite her horrific circumstances). Your biological mother faced different but dire circumstances, too. Each of our courageous birthmoms chose adoption for us, allowing us to be loved like crazy.
Like you, I was able to grow up in a loving Christian home. I had white parents and a multiracial family (with 12 siblings). Adopted as babies, transracial adoption made our lives and our experiences possible. Adoption undeniably unleashed purpose in each of us. I love how you predicted, way back in junior high, that you would become a 49ers quarterback…and God made it happen!
You once said in an interview with CBS that adoption “was the biggest blessing in my life”. I feel the same way. For me, growing up in a diverse home served as a reminder that color (as beautiful as it is) is not what binds us—love is.
Sadly, millions don’t ever get the opportunity that we did—to be given life and the opportunity to love and be loved. Many are killed because they were “unplanned” and supposedly “unwanted.” Adoption shatters the myth of the “unwanted” child. Our lives prove this. Abortion reinforces the lie. It is the ultimate injustice, killing unarmed human beings over 3,000 times a day. Their bodies aren’t “in the street”…just flushed down drains or shoved into bio-waste bags. And they far outnumber the 258 black individuals or 494 white individuals killed by police in one year (79 percent of whom were armed). More unarmed black lives are killed in one day by Planned Parenthood (an estimated 266) than police kill (with or without justification) in an entire year. But somehow the injustice of the slaughter of those who will never get to be adopted and loved or dream like you doesn’t move you to protest. There are people getting paid and getting away with murder. They’re called abortionists, many of whom become millionaires (like Kermit Gosnell) by killing the most defenseless among us.
You’ve been seduced into a false narrative that exploits racism for political means when your experience and your biracialism should call you to be what President Obama has never chosen to be—a unifier. Rockin’ an afro doesn’t make you blacker or righter, by the way. It doesn’t change who I am either. Truth changes who we are…for the better. The external appearance of self is meaningless if valuing truth is a superficial exercise. What is the content that flows from your heart to your mouth, or to your Twitter account (which sadly is currently a hot mess of racist accusations, racial division, and expletives)? These aren’t worth standing up for but taking a knee and reconsidering the long-lasting effect of words. Misinformation is poison. The fundamentally dishonest, Marxist #BlackLivesMatter movement is toxic. Surely, there’s a better way to illuminate actual injustice and address needless, tragic losses of life without spewing the venom of a movement rooted in regurgitated black nationalism.
Martin Luther King powerfully declared: “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, ‘White Power!’ when nobody will shout, ‘Black Power!’ but everybody will talk about God's power and human power!” Frederick Douglass, famed abolitionist who witnessed America gradually achieving the promises of Liberty, also served as a powerful force of racial reconciliation. “I go further, and declare that no man’s devotion to the cause of justice, liberty, and humanity, is to be weighed, measured and determined by his color or race,” he said in one of his last speeches. “We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died.”
No one can force you to stand during the National Anthem. That has to be your choice. But you can choose to stand for truth. Be a factivist. Be a reconciler.
We all have a choice. Out of emotion, we can embrace the lie or we can choose to be proactive and seek out the truth. Education is a painful but liberating process. Douglass eloquently said: “Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.”
Today, I will recite the Pledge of Allegiance with my children in hopes that this nation will not deny, but embrace, its Judeo-Christian roots. I will stand for a flawed National Anthem that extols a flawed, but great, nation where justice repeatedly triumphs. And I will continue to illuminate, as an American who happens to be “biracial”, that no matter the injustice, we tackle it as one human race.
Sincerely,
Ryan Bomberger
Adoptee and Adoptive Father
Co-Founder of The Radiance Foundation
You ain't even worth it. You're nothing, nobody, already forgotten.
Just in case you're lurking.
Dear Mr Bomberger: Stop wasting your time. He has been seduced by the lunatic left, has forsaken all close to him and gone his own way. So be it.
This is a well-stated letter.
Thanks for posting Kaslin, that was a good essay. Unfortunately, in Kaepernick’s case it’s more a matter of casting pearls before swine.
You’re welcome, and you are correct. It is
Recently penned a letter to my Senator Merkely D Oregon. I sent him his quote about not losing your health insurance or doctor when ACA is passed. We are losing our insurance company after 22 years with them, going from $460 in 2009 to $1800 a month next year. I asked him why the only choice we are allowed to make by the democrats is choice to kill our innocent babies in the womb. I asked, why can't I chose my health insurance coverage? I am mandated to carry maternity care at 63, rehab care and mental illness care, don't need any of them.
To a real estate customer, who was complaining how Oregonians all "slaughter our trees". I corrected him and said no Oregonions slaughter their unborn children in the womb, we harvest our trees!"
Adopted here by a WWII veteran. Intense love of country, flag and anthem. Anyone with a different point of view than the above is a traitor.
This letter is so intelligently written and well meaning that it soars right over Kaepernick’s head....
A little less talk, and a lot more action. I would have unmeasured admiration for Kaepernick if he were to go to Mexico to a major athletic event and kneel when they play/sing their national anthem. Man up and show us that you would do that and you’ll have a convert here.
Salute to Ryan.
The school/pledge analogy is way off. As a student in (public?) school you are not an employee. A member of a sports team IS, hence the uniform. They can feel free to protest whatever they want on their own time.
Dear Ryan Bomberger,
Your words are so full of light, warmth, and goodness, as given to you by our Father God.
You fully know that Kap is mired in darkness and bitterness, so the light you want to show him will be too blinding for him right now.
But thank you for sowing the good seed in his dark soul. May it someday bear fruit and save Kap from his current destructive path.
IMO, the NFL is playing with fire on this anthem issue. In essence, the employees are engaging in political protests in the workplace. They should be fined, suspended or kicked out of the league. The NFL is an entertainment business. Political protests will most assuredly hurt that business.
If they don’t crack down on this, what will be next? Players coming out on the field with their danglies swinging to protest the killing of Anaconda’s in the Amazon?
This is exactly what happened in the NBA when a similar misfit went through the same charade back in the 1990s.
The author clearly put a lot of effort into this.
It’d be far simpler just to write:
Dear Kaepernick -
You’re an *sshole.
Not just this idiot. Other America-hating racists are joining in.
Their man, bammy, has shown nothing but hate for this country in his 8 years in power. Now they long for getting hillary into the White House so she can continue inflicting damage on the country that she hates.
For a look at the homicide statistics, go here:
The letter writer asks Kaepernick to become a factivist. Kaepernick has already proven that the truth is not in him and facts don’t matter. Colin’s citations of BLM BS proves that he has swallowed the lies and acts to further those lies in the media.
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