I always stand up for the Star Spangled Banner. Unless, of course, I’m in the band playing it, where it’s considered bad form for anybody but the director and the percussion section to stand up.

And I have essentially given up on wasting my emotional energies on other people’s actions that really don’t affect me one way or the other.

That’s why I ignored the web uproar about Colin Kaepernick’s not standing for the National Anthem. He was expressing his opinion, and I was not required either to agree or disagree with it.

Then I saw a meme that had a picture that was supposed to be of Kaepernick’s house and a line that essentially said that he had gotten his; so what is he griping about.

That bothered me.

Kaepernick never said that he was oppressed. He said that his gesture was for what he sees as wrongdoings against African Americans and other minorities in this country. In other words, he was thinking about somebody other than himself. Evidently something the generator of the meme didn't understand.

That seems to be declining (or has declined) in this country. We seem to have essentially run out of empathy.

For those who have not seen or thought about empathy in so long that they’ve forgotten what it is, here’s the definition: the ability to identify with or understand another’s situations or feelings. One source says that it’s a distinctly human capability. We literally feel someone else's pain. Sometimes we're even moved to do something about it.

It’s not the same as sympathy, which is a feeling that you care about or are sorry about some else’s trouble, grief, or misfortune. 

Since empathy involves identifying with the others and literally feeling their pain, it’s no wonder that we’re much quicker to sympathize than to empathize.

We’re also much quicker to grasp at no-cost gestures than to actually do something about the problem.

Which brings us back to Kaepernick taking a knee during the National Anthem. For that we have outrage, an entire police force threatening not to work football games at the stadium, and people calling him the second most hated man in the NFL. But is he really less patriotic to shun the gesture and call for real action for real problems? Is it less patriotic to think that the nation we call the greatest in the world can actually act like the greatest nation in the world for all of its people?

I’m not particularly fond of The Star Spangled Banner as a song. I don’t know many musicians who are. Its meter is clunky. Its rhyme scheme is erratic. And when you get to “the land of the free,” everybody except the sopranos and tenors mouth the words until the melody comes back into range. But I do admire the sentiment. When Francis Scott Key wrote the words after the shelling of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, I can imagine that he was really surprised to see the flag still flying the next morning. The young republic was in danger of extinction. There were people who wanted to become an English colony again. We stood a real chance of losing everything we had won just over 30 years before. So “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” were a real threat, and the fact that the flag was still waving the next morning meant something.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years, and we have made a good deal of progress. Legal slavery no longer exists. Women and unpropertied men have the vote. Laws regarding civil rights and voting rights were passed. But, to borrow a metaphor from Kaepernick’s trade, that’s not the goal line. I’m not sure that it’s even midfield.

We still have 45,000,000 people living below the federally defined poverty level, and we argue about whether a CEO making $24,000,000 a year can spare another million or so for taxes.

We still have thousands of families going into bankruptcy because of medical bills.

We still have nearly 20% of our population facing hunger every day. For households with children, the “nutritionally insecurity” rate is over 20%.

We still have neighborhoods that are drained of hope and full of unemployment, resentment, and danger. And the best most of us can do is point fingers and suggest that the people living there should make better choices.

Some people are not capable of empathy. It requires that we get outside of ourselves and into the positions of others. It requires imagination. It requires worrying as much about the condition of others as we do about our own condition.

All of that is tough and uncomfortable. That’s probably the reason we go for the easier answer. We’re proud of ourselves for flying the flag and standing for the National Anthem and so quickly forgive ourselves for doing nothing about the problems that face do many of our countrymen.

Doing something about them isn’t about gestures, standing up or sitting down. It’s not about singing or playing the anthem. It’s not about posting dismissive memes on Facebook. It’s about worrying about somebody other than ourselves.

If you read American history, you know we’ve never been really good at that. We’ve always been grasping and greedy—from pushing the Indians off of their land to allowing the very rich push the very poor even further down.

Except…

There were times when the United States were really united, and its people joined in common cause. I lived through one of those: World War II. There were profiteers and crooks, of course, but for the most part, the people all joined in to do what they could for their country, whether—like my father and his brothers—it meant going into service, or—for the rest of us—stomping tin cans, growing Victory Gardens, and learning to live on rationed goods. We not only sympathized with those who lost their family members, we had empathy for people who were worse off than we were, knowing that even though we had little, there were people who had nothing.

The social problems we face now are, in their way, similar to the problems we faced during the war in that they require that we as a nation get involved and deal with them.

I don’t care whether Colin Kaepernick stands up or sits down. I do care whether the rest of us, seeing that the benefits of citizenship in this country are distributed so unevenly, just sit there. I imagine Kaepernick will stand up when we do.