I love my country, but it’s not perfect.

Oh boy. Here I go.

1. It is possible to love your country/be a patriot and still protest the wrongs you see and/or experience. Our country has a long history of peaceful patriots who protested and brought about change.

2. Peaceful protest is not disrespectful to the men and women who serve in the military. It is the opposite. Veterans serve, and sometimes die, for our freedom to take a knee, to worship as we are called, to pursue happiness.

3. Our military should be respected, but so should all of the civilians who peacefully protest and bring about change. Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, workers’ rights – peaceful protest brought these about, not the military.

4. If you love something, you want it to be the best it can be. I love my country, but it’s not perfect. Identifying a problem, and working to solve it, is not unpatriotic. I don’t care if the things I don’t give a sh*t about fall apart. I care very deeply if my marriage, friendships, family, etc. fall apart. So, I do my best to identify and work on the problems in my marriage, friendships, family, etc. If these NFL players didn’t care about what’s going on in their communities and country, they wouldn’t be peacefully demonstrating.

5. The flag and the national anthem belong to all Americans, not just soldiers. Liberty and justice for ALL.

6. I see so many comments like ‘The football field is not the place to protest.” Why the hell not? Oh, the sacred football field! It’s exactly the place to protest. Why? Because where else would this protest reach so many people and have such a powerful impact? And is there any time or place where it is BAD to protest discrimination, hate crimes, oppression, and racism?

7. It doesn’t matter if someone is wealthy. They have just as much the right to protest injustice as anyone else.

8. Other comments I truly don’t understand say things like, “If you won’t stand for the anthem, then you can go to another country!” You are entirely missing the point. The football players are exercising their freedom to protest. Freedom means that people who think differently than you do, can and will speak up – because they are FREE to do so.

9. The same people who not too long ago were calling me ‘snowflake’ - and other much less civilized names - because I was angry that we elected a president who bragged that he could sexually assault women because he was rich and famous, are now acting very snowflake-like about a peaceful protest.

10. You don’t agree with me? Fine. Isn’t it great that we live in a country where both sides have the right to be heard?

I really don’t want to get into Trump right now, because he exhausts me, but let me just put two facts out there: Trump said black people peacefully protesting by kneeling are ‘sons of bitches’, while white people who raise their arms in the Nazi salute, chant ‘blood and soil’, and who killed a woman, are ‘very fine people’.