Athletes Speaking Out
When a Hollywood film star or CEO or athlete chooses to speak out on a controversial political or social conflict they always run the risk of being dismissed or even ridiculed for speaking out on something they know little or nothing about.

Sometimes the criticism is well-grounded.  This time it was not and the MSNBC coverage of the story gets my nomination for best covered story of 2014.

Here is a Salon story with a link to the MSNBC interview. Ari Melber, filling in ably for the amazing Chris Hayes, asks the right questions and the right follow ups, with just enough pushing to let the union official steadily reveal, one layer at a time, that his comments were more about thoughtless defensiveness than about an honest discussion of the challenges we face.

Andrew Hawkins, a player for the hapless Cleveland Browns, turns out to be incredibly thoughtful and honest and real.  Why would anyone apologize for calling for justice is a very good question.

Of course, the mass media rarely makes connections across stories (or historical eras).  Today we have stories about American's torturing our enemies abroad and American police killing unarmed citizens at home.  While there are many ways to reject mainstream media failures to make these connections, this story is one worth considering.  Calling for us to step back and 'see' ourselves as we are seen by others, the author notes that for Americans (are we unique here?) 'anything other than a black and white world perplexes us.'

Making connections across news stories is nearly always unsettling for the powerful.

"And as soon as I started thinking about the Senate’s torture report in the context of America’s conduct abroad, many other things seemed immediately of a piece. The string of police murders. The Surveillance State. The license granted corporations and the wealthy to purchase elections. No welfare for the poor but welfare for Wall Street. A minimum wage no one can live on. The bold-faced biases of our highest court—and when the judiciary goes, I learned during my years as a correspondent, all else is either gone already or on the way down."

In the end, I still see and experience an America not captured here, but an America likely to become stronger and more like the nation we aspire to become by engaging with the connections being made here.

He concludes that "a nation guilty of torturing its prisoners, shooting minority children, fortifying its oligarchies and surveilling its population 24/7 and everywhere has nothing to teach the world about democracy, justice, civil rights or the other values we profess but do not any longer live by. We have surrendered the franchise, such as it was ever ours."