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As we discussed yesterday, football player Colin Kaepernick didn’t vote in last week’s presidential election. It wouldn’t have been a huge story except for the fact that Kaepernick has been in the middle of a national conversation about race, police violence and patriotism for months. Colin has spoken eloquently about the need to address police violence and racial injustice in our country, and he has made a point of not standing for the national anthem ahead of his football games.

The fact that Colin placed himself in the middle of these hot-button political issues and then didn’t even bother to vote seems… stupid. I don’t have any other words for it. Idiotic? Ridiculous? Moronic? It’s just f—king stupid. I understand how people can feel let down by their choices at every level of government, but that’s exactly why more people should be engaged, should be politically active, and should, at the very f—king least, VOTE. Well, guess what? Colin has never voted. He’s never even been registered to vote.

Colin Kaepernick raised eyebrows last week when he revealed that he did not vote in the presidential election amid a football season in which his protest of racial inequality gained national attention. In fact, it would have been problematic if he had. The Sacramento Bee found that the San Francisco 49ers quarterback has never been registered to vote.

Kaepernick, who was raised in Turlock, turned 18 in 2005, but he has not registered to vote in California at any point in the last decade, according to records maintained by the California Secretary of State. He also did not register in Nevada while he attended the University of Nevada, Reno, from 2006 to 2010, according to the Washoe County Registrar of Voters.

That means he missed presidential elections in 2008 and 2012 – when Democrat Barack Obama was elected president – in addition to a variety of state and local elections in other years.

Attempts to reach Kaepnernick were unsuccessful. Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Kaepernick said he did not care who won the 2016 election and it would have been “hypocritical of me to vote” for either President-elect Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

[From the Sacramento Bee]

Yeah, if he’s not willing to do the bare minimum of citizenship and civic duty, then I say we need to just stop paying any attention to anything he’s got to say. This goes for every single person who doesn’t vote yet proclaims to “care” about this issue or that issue. If you care, you vote. If you don’t vote, you’re publicly telling the world that you don’t really give a sh-t about what happens in your city, county, state or country. You’re saying that you think it’s all broken and you’re too cynical to believe anything can ever change.

(The one exception to this whole “don’t speak if you don’t vote” rule is obviously Jehovah’s Witnesses. Witnesses, for the most part, don’t believe in voting as an article of their faith. But Kaepernick is not a Witness. He’s just a guy who wants to be an activist but doesn’t want to participate in democracy.)

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