Excerpted from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut:
The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren't for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.
When Kurt Vonnegut wrote it in 1973, his novel spent 56 weeks on the bestseller list; when Colin Kaepernick said pretty much the exact same thing in 2016 he became a blacklisted pariah.
I wonder what was different?
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