Crazy enough

This will no doubt come as a surprise to those who know me as basically a sloth with library cards, but I’ve been buying—and using—athletic shoes since my college days. Runners, walkers, cross-trainers, soccer shoes—the whole megillah.

But in all this time, I’ve never owned a pair of Nikes. I’ve bought Brooks, New Balance, Asics, Saucony, Avia and—for the past six years—Mizuno. For some reason I never got Nike, Reebok or Adidas.

However, this changed yesterday, when I walked over to the froofy running store in the People’s Republic’s Faux Urban Center and bought these:

I’ll alternate them with my current pair of Mizunos, which are already apparently showing signs of being walked on a lot (two months old, already wear on the soles).

I bought them because of the #JustDoIt30 commercial featuring Colin Kaepernick.

Kaepernick’s been on Nike’s payroll for years, but never used due to him being a lightning rod for faux-patriotic goober hate drummed up by our Golfer-in-Chief (who, tbh, is still pissed off that the NFL wouldn’t let him buy a team in the 80s, and he lost money on his USFL team, and more money when he lost his lawsuit against the NFL; we all know that his one constancy is his ability to hold a grudge across decades) because he knelt during the playing of the national anthem at football games to protest police murders of African-Americans. When his contract with the Forty-Niners ran out, no NFL team would hire him. A company with less money in its coffers would have cut him altogether; it certainly wouldn’t have built a campaign around him. Nike’s taken a bold step with this one.

I get it that no corporation runs an ad campaign just to do the right thing. Nike is expecting to make a buck out of this—they’re expecting to make fistfuls of bucks out of it. They’re also attracting faux-patriotic goober hate, as manifested by the public shoe-burning videos making the rounds of social media. (Yes, they’re burning shoes they’ve spent hundreds of dollars on, just as they bought Keurigs to smash and Starbucks coffee to pour out in “protest” of corporate actions. They ain’t too bright, this crowd.)

I don’t give a toss about football, so I’ve been at a remove from all the take-a-knee controversy. My opinion is that this is legitimate, powerful protest, although I think the protest would start really taking off if white players started taking a knee, too. When people from the power-holding class start protesting, that’s when change comes about. Some measure of the efficacy of Kaepernick’s protest can be found in the spit-hissing rage of all the goobers, who falsely turned it into disrespect of the flag, which morphed into disrespect of the military. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander, tweeted about it a couple of days ago:

You should look at some of the replies in the thread—they’re stultifying in their stupidity.

So, no brand loyalty, no real connection to the sport, and yet I was deeply moved by this commercial that focuses on people with crazy dreams; so much so that I went into the froofy running store and asked specifically for something in the stability line, and do any Nikes fit the bill? My $130 ain’t going to take the company too far, but I felt I had to do something.

And I’m going to work on getting my dreams crazy enough.