A NEW ERA OF PATRIOTIC CORRECTNESS?  Colin Kaepernick, if you didn't know, no longer plays football for the San Francisco 49ers

A NEW ERA OF PATRIOTIC CORRECTNESS?  Colin Kaepernick, if you didn't know, no longer plays football for the San Francisco 49ers. In fact, he no longer plays for any team. In 2016, he began "taking a knee" during the national anthem at NFL games to protest police brutality against black Americans. At the time, before George Floyd's murder incited mass protests, Kaepernick was a pioneer. It came at a steep cost. For one thing, he's been blacklisted from the league ever since. For another, conservative media excoriated him and any football player who followed him, calling them disrespectful of military veterans and traitors to the country. In a 2017 speech in Alabama, the president said that an NFL player who kneeled was a "son of a bitch" and should be "fired." (Links to an external site.)

Nonetheless, Nike created an ad featuring Colin Kaepernick (Links to an external site.)

 that aired on the first day of the NFL season a year later. Its appearance was almost immediately followed by Facebook posts of people burning Nike shoes (Links to an external site.)

, purportedly to condemn Nike for anti-patriotism, and Nike's customer call line was besieged by rants against "disrespect" (Links to an external site.)

 for the flag, the national anthem, and the military.

Phil Klay, whose essay is linked below, coined the phrase "patriotic correctness." He doesn't define precisely what he means, but he refers to an aggressive strain in contemporary America of loudly proclaiming one's patriotism. At the same time, anyone who does not show adequate reverence to the national anthem, the flag, or the military of the United States is denounced--and sometimes that's been violent (Links to an external site.)

. Klay served with the US Marines in Iraq, and he's cynical of America's politicized obsession with "patriotic correctness" at the same time as citizens are happily ignorant about our young military men and women dying in America's wars. "Violating the rules of patriotic correctness is a far worse sin in the eyes of the American public than sending soldiers to die uselessly," he writes.

America in recent years has shown increasing intolerance towards dissent, even when that dissent is as innocuous as silently kneeling. We seem to be in the grip of a new era of "patriotic correctness," a time when parts of the American public aggressively demand displays of allegiance and "patriotism." What does this mean for America?

Read the articles and listen to the podcast (see links below). For your reading response, write at least 300 words  inspired by this topic. Here are some ideas.

• What does it really mean to be "patriotic"? Has it changed in your lifetime?
• Why has America lapsed into a new era of conformity, a time when failing to adequately display one's "love of country" arouses so much fury in some Americans? Why do simple symbols and rituals invoke so much patriotism in others?
• Does American patriotism help or hurt this country?
• Does America's patriotism make it blind to its own fallibility, and so causes us to hurt other nations?
• Is American patriotism something to be admired and emulated by other countries?