Understood, its deeply personal for me too (family reasons) but politics is a full contact sport and if you play you play to win. Taking a knee is a dumb move because existing yes voters (those who already haven't voted) won't change but importantly wouldn't have expected the gesture, so not doing anything loses you nothing. No voters won't change but it will piss them off mightily (and the troll in me says it would be worth it for that alone), so the question is how does this play to the undecideds. There probably aren't too many informed undecideds given the level of discourse in political media - most are going to be low info / low engagement voters. My hypothesis is that those people, when pushed, are probably a no voter. Those are the people that just need to be kept docile enough to not vote at all. The kind of thing that gets up their nose is typical nationalist things. Having players kneel during the national anthem would be the kind of thing that would do it, in my view.

Essentially this is "dead dove, do not eat" territory.