But the issue isn't just what we think it is. It's also from the other side, however subhuman we think them, says. It's not like we have rights and they only have responsibilities--either's neither a plantation nor the USSR or China nor the 3rd Reich.
Employees work for a fiscal organization and get money from that organization. They have responsibilities to do their jobs and not harm their employer. In fact, many employees get their respect and actual public voice, such as it is, from their jobs.
That's true for me as a teacher. It's true for NFL players. It's true for an orchestra conductor. Take away their job and suddenly they have no voice. That running back who hasn't played for 3 years has 0 yards earned, 0 touchdowns, 0 interceptions. That social studies teacher who likes to talk politics in class because "he's right" but who hasn't worked for 3 years isn't a teacher. The orchestra conductor or series actor who speaks out forcefully but hasn't worked in that field for 5 years ... apart from being famous because they're famous, they get little attention.
Unless speaking out by millionaires on national media with broad public support--the height of "bravery" for many--is user-friendly and customer-supported. Then, since it's *helping* bring in $, that's fine.
We confuse customers and employees. As I teacher, I can't get up and trash Trump any more than I can laud him. Or, when Obama was president, Obama. I also avoid religion in my classroom. Yes, many think it's the moral thing to do to take a strong stance and convince students the error of their ways. I tell them to consider the evidence they have, but that means no more "Repent and be saved through the blood of the Lamb" than "There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet" than "all that religious shite is stupid and you're just sediment in the gene pool if you believe it." I'm not a preacher. I teach a science class in which, oddly, neither evolution nor religion have pretty any say whatsoever.
In fact, as an employee whose job is mostly interacting with the public for the public, presenting a product, I can be fired for doing things that make our customers, the students' parents, sufficiently pissed off. It's the same at DU. A teacher does something wrong, all we have is the student's word for it, and since we share skin color, language, or social class with the student, the student *must* be right and there's a collective "off with her head!" Based on hearsay from one witness. My district has fired a teacher for going to happy hour on Friday after school still wearing a school t-shirt and getting drunk; some parents saw it, questioned the moral rectitude of the teacher, spread the word, and a month later the teacher was told that she was an embarrassment, a bond referendum was coming up that needed to pass, and hundreds of parents signed a petition to get rid of her or they'd vote no. Welcome to democracy. If you're a teacher, don't get drunk on your birthday in the area your school is zoned for. But as an employee of the district, this should have been something she was aware could happen. Otherwise she was just plain stupid.
It would have been worse if she'd taken a controversial stand *as* a teacher in the district to argue with the voters. If we can't understand this, we're substituted "we're right, scream it until it drowns out the thinking!" for "I want to understand."
If a customer protests, well, they're paying to be there and unless they're too offensive to other patrons that's fine. They're not a group, cohesive and unified *by us* and certainly not by themselves. They define their own categories. We're not so powerful and all-controlling as to define their identity and code of behavior and enforce it on them (yet, I guess). But the NFL players, like teachers, are not patrons. The customers, like the students' parents, are patrons, and the NFL players, like teachers, are their (indirect) subordinates.
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