FILE PHOTO | Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley)
Now that town beaches are open again to old men and the dogs who own them, Codger and Cur are blissfully back on the sand.
Standing on Wades Beach of an early morning, gazing at Shell Beach in the distance bisecting the sea and the sky, Codger just wants to take root. Despite its own nagging issues of ticks, water and short-term rentals, Shelter Island seems cocooned from the turbulence beyond the waters.
Cur concurs.
But then there will be a flash in cyberspace and the ever-lurking bridge to the mainland reappears. This time it was a tweet from Lee Zeldin, who represents the Island in the 1st Congressional District. He wrote: “Suspect in custody. You are welcome Colin Kaepernick.”
It was a cryptic message that Zeldin later unpacked. He was linking the peaceful protest of a professional football player with the terrorist bombing that injured 29 people in New York two weeks ago. Zeldin went on to say, “I’m insulted and disgusted when someone refuses to say the pledge or stand for the anthem.”
Codger was insulted and disgusted that someone on the taxpayer payroll with the power to make a difference in the life of this Island could make such a deplorable connection. Was Zeldin tone deaf or deviously trying to distract us?
As we all know by now, at the beginning of this month, Colin Kaepernick, a back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, sat during the playing of the national anthem before a game. It was barely noticed until a reporter questioned him. Kaepernick said he was protesting racial injustice, particularly the recent epidemic of shootings of African-Americans by police officers, usually white.
No wonder Kaepernick struck a nerve. Between his initial protest and Zeldin’s tweet, there were at least two more fatal shootings. More and more athletes, high school, college and professional, women as well as men, white as well as black, have taken a knee during the playing of the anthem, even raising their fists, as Tommie Smith and John Carlos did 48 years ago at the Mexico City Olympics.
Codger was there and thought it was the most peaceful gesture of that year of riots and assassinations.
Maybe that’s why Codger is so disturbed. Smith and Carlos’ gesture was also a protest against racial inequality, growing out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The reaction was swift and brutal. Responding to what it saw as a challenge to authority, the U.S. Olympic Committee drove Smith and Carlos out of Mexico, and the sports establishment back home made sure their careers as athletes and coaches were crushed.
It has taken almost a half-century for that spirit of athletic defiance to rise again. Codger thinks of Kaepernick and Zeldin as echoes of 1968. And he wonders about the parallel between those two sanctuaries — sports and Shelter Island — and how we vainly try to keep them separated from the mainland.
Kaepernick does not have the weight of the 1968 Olympic demonstrators, much less Muhammad Ali, but in this age of instant media he became famous faster and his protest, as they say, has legs. It rides the crest of the Black Lives Matter movement and a presidential election in which race may be even as important as gender.
Congressman Zeldin was hardly the first to spin Kaepernick’s mild protest against racism into disrespect for the flag, the military, America. But his tweet and its amplification was particularly blustery and cynical, modeled, of course, on the tactics of the elephant on the beach, Donald J. Trump, who Zeldin supports.
If Zeldin wanted to take Kaepernick seriously, he might show interest in what seems to be an intractable pattern of blue on black shootings before it happens in his district. Or in the larger patterns of racism, in housing, employment, education and justice.
Codger could understand if Zeldin had tried to make this into an honest debate on the nature of patriotism, even on the appropriateness of athletes demonstrating at public events. But that was not his purpose. Zeldin willfully ignored the reason behind the protest — an attempt to extend the discussion of the everyday evil of racial inequality.
Whether your feelings toward Zeldin are based on his opposition to gay rights, abortion and gun control, or his sponsorship of the Fluke Fairness Act (it has to do with management of the summer flounder population) you should consider, as does Codger, the character of a politician who would attempt to divert us from the real issues, to stir discord and grub for votes.
Codger thinks Zeldin revealed himself as unworthy of office as his presidential candidate. Ultimately, Zeldin can’t be good for an Island that, despite its hardy independence, often needs mainland support from politicians with integrity.
Cur concurs.