San Francisco Giants' manager Gabe Kapler will pause his peaceful protest during the National Anthem for the team's Memorial Day matchup with the Philadelphia Phillies Monday.
"Yeah, I'm going to come out tonight," Kapler said in the visitor's dugout at Citizens Bank Park Monday afternoon. "I spent a little time thinking about this and talking to some people around the game, some veterans and some people who were invested in gun control. I wrote a little bit about it, just to make sure that I have my thoughts well formulated. So I tweeted that out and you can feel free to refer to anything that I wrote. It's not a lot, but pretty simple and straight to the point. But I've shared a lot of thoughts over the last couple of days and prior to that as well. And so I just figured I would tailor them for everybody."
In a post on his "Kap Lifetyle" site, the reigning National League Manager of the Year went into further detail on his decision:
"Today, I’ll be standing for the anthem. While I believe strongly in the right to protest and the importance of doing so, I also believe strongly in honoring and mourning our country’s service men and women who fought and died for that right. Those who serve in our military, and especially those who have paid the ultimate price for our rights and freedoms, deserve that acknowledgment and respect, and I am honored to stand on the line today to show mine."
Kapler also encouraged donations to Everytown; "an organization dedicated to ending gun violence" and Heart & Armor; "an organization devoted to veteran health and linking the experience of veterans to civilians."
The 46-year-old announced Friday that he wouldn't come out for the National Anthem "until I feel better about the direction of our country." Just days after a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas killed at least 21 people, including 19 students, Kapler wrote a lengthy piece on his website:
"But we weren’t given bravery, and we aren’t free. The police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops. We aren’t free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills.
"I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents. We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the 'shining city on the hill.' But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings. We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn."
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