Gabe Kapler observed his own moment of silence sometime before the San Francisco Giants team he led opened his Memorial Day weekend series in Cincinnati on Friday night. His moment did not come before a national anthem or while standing on the edge of a dugout.
Instead, he switched to a keyboard while silently filtering his own pain and outrage in a blog post entitled “The House of the Brave?”
He then tweeted the post, describing it with one phrase: “We are not the land of the free or the home of the brave right now.”
“When I was the same age as the children of Uvalde, my father taught me to defend the promise of loyalty when I believed that my country represented its people well or to protest and sit down when I was not. I don’t think he represents us well, ”Kapler wrote, adding,“ Every time I put my hand on my heart and take off my hat, I participate in an exaltation of the only country where these mass shootings. take place.”
Consequently, as Kapler would later tell reporters in Cincinnati, he no longer intends to be on the field of national anthems before the game “until I feel better with the leadership of our country.” Kapler said he didn’t necessarily expect his protest to “move the needle,” but that he felt strong enough to take that step.
After Friday’s game was delayed by just over two hours due to inclement weather, only seven giants were on the field – two coaches, four players and a sports coach – when the anthem was played.
Opinion: Texas school shooting
Times Opinion comment on the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
- Michelle Goldberg: As we face another tragedy, the most common feeling is a bitter acknowledgment that nothing will change.
- Nicholas Kristof, a former columnist for the Times Opinion: Weapons policy is complicated and politically annoying, and will not make everyone safe. But it could reduce gun deaths.
- Roxane Gay: Despite all our cultural obsession with civility, there is nothing more uncivilized than the political establishment’s acceptance of the constancy of mass shootings.
- Jay Caspian Kang: By sharing memes with each new tragedy, we’ve created a museum of unbearable grief, increasingly dense with names and photos of the dead.
In his blog post, Kapler said he regretted being on the field for the national anthem and keeping a moment’s silence before a game in San Francisco against the Mets this week just hours after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Texas. Kapler said that “I was having a hard time articulating my thoughts on the day of filming” and that “sometimes, for me, it takes a couple of days to put things together.”
In this way, he is no different from another sports figure in the Bay Area who struggled with the most significant way to protest. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick, before the San Francisco 49ers, also struggled. He began sitting down during the national anthem to protest racial inequality and police brutality, and after consulting with Nate Boyer, a former Green Army green beret player and former NFL player, he began to kneel. if.
For Kaepernick, that protest proved to have lasting consequences. Despite having previously led his team to a Super Bowl appearance, he was not signed after resigning from his contract after the 2016 season. Since then, he has only been given the opportunity to coach a few teams. times. In 2019, he and his former teammate Eric Reid settled a lawsuit against the NFL in which they had accused the league teams of colluding against them.
“My brain said to fall to one knee; my body didn’t listen, “Kapler wrote about his whirlwind of emotions before this week’s Mets-Giants game.” I wanted to walk back inside; instead, I froze. I felt like a coward. I wanted to draw attention to myself, I didn’t want to take the victims or their families out, there was a baseball game, a rock band, the lights, the show, I knew thousands of people used this game to escape of the horrors of the world for a while. I knew that thousands more would not understand the gesture and would take it as an offense to the military, to the veterans, to themselves. “
Kapler’s action continues with a steady stream of protests from the sports world this week. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr spoke out strongly in favor of gun control ahead of his team’s Western Conference Finals game on Tuesday. On Thursday, both the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays used their Twitter and Instagram channels to post facts about gun violence instead of posting anything about the game between rival teams.
“We choose our politicians to represent our interests,” Kapler wrote. “Immediately after this shooting, they told us we needed locked doors and armed teachers. They gave us thoughts and prayers. They told us it could have been worse, and we just need love.
“But they didn’t give us courage and we are not free,” he wrote. “Police at the scene handcuffed a mother as she asked them to come in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge to stop the shooter, including a father who knew his daughter was murdered while arguing with police We are not free when politicians decide that pressure groups and the arms industry are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without bulletproof backpacks and sniper drills assets “.