The Pro Test

We are coming up on an interesting anniversary. It has been almost a full calendar year since Colin Kaepernick took the field to play in an NFL game. His former team, the San Francisco Forty-Niners, have gone on record saying that they would have cut him if he hadn't opted out of his contract. The team had fallen on difficult times, from playing in a Super Bowl in 2013 to winning just two games in what would be Kaepernick's last season.
Cut to the beginning of the 2017 season. Colin is out of a job, but a number of teams lose their starting quarterbacks to injury or just bad play. This guy with an 88.9 career quarterback rating is sitting at home, waiting for the phone to ring. Or maybe he wasn't. This is the guy who, during the preseason of 2016, began to kneel during the National Anthem. At first, he went essentially unnoticed, until other players began to join him. First on his own team, and then on teams across the league. When asked, Mister Kaepernick described his protest this way: "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."
Cut to a year later, where that message has been run through a blender of conservative "thought" that turned it into a matter of disrespecting veterans and the military and the Constitution and motherhood. The public relations nightmare that would have arisen for any team that would have chosen to add Colin Kaepernick to their roster was never worth the potential wins that he might have brought to a struggling franchise. 
And somehow the cultural impact of Colin Kaepernick continues even after a year away from a football field, kneeling or not. GQ magazine named him "Citizen of the Year." Conservative pundits have not been as kind. For a great many of these talking heads, he has become the Meme of the Year, most recently featured in a photoshopped picture posted by Tomi Lahren. She pasted a kneeling Kaepernick into a black and white photo of a World War Two landing craft, with soldiers rushing onto Omaha Beach. The suggestion made that while good Americans are confronting Nazis, Colin is taking a knee. Taking a knee rather than confronting Nazis? Who does that  sound like?
Not Colin Kaepernick.  
How  about the guy who continues to rant about the behavior of professional athletes, except those who are still willing to play golf with him? Maybe Colin should take up golf.