Then another woman pulled up. She was bawling her eyes out because she was driving by and saw the protest signs, the flags, and us talking with emotion. She said she was caught between the old and the new; she loved the Seahawks but didn’t want anyone in the military to feel bad. She wanted to respect the military and also support equality. We ended up talking for about twenty or thirty minutes. Nice lady. I am glad she pulled over, for safety reasons alone. (Don’t ever sob and drive. That’s just dangerous.)
But I was also ready for it. Throughout this experience people have been coming up to me, very emotional, saying, “Thank you.” Black and brown people who have felt the sting of inequality; white people who are wrestling with these injustices for the first time, crying as if they are newborn, angry at the world they’re seeing now that they’re out of the womb; and, yes, vets who have said to me that military personnel are divided in their opinions as much as anyone else, and they didn’t want me to cave to the bullshit. For me, it’s been powerfully emotional and a little bit over the top. Seriously, imagine people coming up to you, weeping, several times a day. It can be exhausting. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. For all the people who say they hate me and want me out of this country—which my family’s blood and sweat built from the ground up—there are more people who sympathize with what we are all trying to do, who want to see a better world. I treasure this time because it’s like water in a canteen, and in the future, when my throat is dry, I’m going to remember all these people and keep pushing forward, with my eyes on the prize.
The goal is worth the sacrifice. For me, it’s always been about the human interaction, pushing people to respect one another in every facet of life. The loss of a human life is the hardest on those left behind. That’s the end of everything. There are no more walks in the park. “Black Lives Matter” is saying that all of our lives have value. If a soldier loses his life, it’s just as important as Tamir Rice losing his life. We need to celebrate every life and mourn every death because behind every one is a family in pain.
As everything was raging all around me—the president cursing my name, fans yelling slurs—I felt oddly at peace. Martellus said to me, “Bro, you sound like you’re sixty years old.” But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t fear. We need to talk about fear, because when you feel that fear, it means shit is real.
On Fear
It can be a burden to stand up and speak your truth. You feel disheveled, isolated, like you are holding up the earth and it could all come crashing down. You know it’s going to be hard before you start because so many people tell you not to do it, to be quiet, to shut up and play. But it’s even harder than they warned you: the anxiety will scratch at your insides like the creature in Alien, except it never bursts out of your chest, it just stays there, scratching.
You grow up wanting to be a positive force, to try and change the world for the better, but when the opportunity comes to step up, when it knocks at your door, I can tell you the question changes. It goes from, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to do something like that?” to, “Damn, do I really want to do something like that? Do I really want to put my family at risk? Do I really want to be judged by people who don’t know me or care to understand my motivations, no matter how clear I make them?” It’s like the difference between watching Die Hard, thinking how cool it would be to take on a building full of terrorists, and doing it in real life, shoeless in the Nakatomi Building, jumping off the roof with a fire hose tied around your waist. You’d be scared as hell, peeing down your leg.
It takes a lot to put everything on the line: your livelihood, your morals, your community, everything. I suspect a lot of people think, from a distance, that it’s not that hard to do, like, “Oh, I’d be on the front lines. I’d sit. I’d raise a fist. I’d take a knee.” But it’s so much easier to talk shit than to do shit, because once you are out there representing what you believe, people see the real you. Most everybody in the world wears a mask, and very rarely do people unveil who they really are. And I’ve done that. I’m naked here. So I’m going to be judged by strangers on the core of who I am, and, yes, that makes me vulnerable and it can even feel terrifying. Nobody wants to lose his job like Kaepernick and risk becoming another former NFL player who ends up broke. But if the price of employment is silence … I just can’t do it anymore.
As I write this now, I’ll
