Sam Carchidi waded out of his depth last night.

He ventured out past his knees carrying only a paddle with no boat… and some hastily scrawled message in a bottle complaining about the lack of food selection in the Flyers’ press room.

Using his platform as a credentialed beat writer for one of the four major sports, Carchidi sat atop his Madison Square Garden perch and weighed in on the topic of the day with all the nuance of a turtle mounting a large rock:

Needless to say, Carchidi got abused for these Tweets. It was delightful to watch, but not for the reasons you might think.

I’m not going to rip Sam for his views– if he is fundamentally opposed to using the National Anthem as a platform of your own, then that’s his view and it’s one many people share. The problem, however, is that people on both sides of this debate fail to even attempt to understand the other side. This is, for lack of a better term, not a black and white issue.

On one hand, you have athletes who feel that the National Anthem provides them a platform to raise awareness for an issue – call it police brutality or just social injustice in general – in a peaceful way. In the grand scheme of things, it inconveniences no one and, ironically, proves to use one of the rights defenders of the flag often cling to as the pillar which makes this country great.

On the other hand, there are people who fought or perhaps died to protect that right, and many find it reprehensible for someone to use the National Anthem as a spectacle to impart their view, especially in a literal arena that affords the person so many privileges. It also shouldn’t be lost on anyone that athletes are willing employees, and whether right or wrong, their actions can impact the bottom line of their teams. This is perhaps the most summarily dismissed issue with Colin Kaepernick– regardless of the merit of his message, signing him poses a monetary risk to NFL owners, and it’s one they simply don’t have to take.

There are way more factors in this debate than simply the question of right or wrong.

The social justice warriors who readily dismiss opposing viewpoints, not attempting to understand what the anthem represents to so many people, are just as wrong as Carchidi is for casting such a blanket rebuke of a dynamic he clearly doesn’t understand.

His Tweet lacked any semblance of nuance. It doesn’t even attempt to comprehend the meaning behind the protests, not the least of which this weekend had more to do with telling Donald Trump to fuck off than it did with any one particular issue. And the tone-deafness of using a sport like hockey, almost exclusively white, to make his point is laughable and yet par for the course for Carchidi. His Tweet dismisses hundreds of years of pent up frustrations and pleas for help with a casual “not during my sports” take, ironically using his platform that exists solely because of sports and his employer’s head-scratching decision to allow him to continue to cover them.

From a personal standpoint, I’m just soaking in the fact that, over the last two weeks, two long-time punching bags of this site, Carchidi and Marcus Hayes, are being found out on a much larger scale to be, for lack of a better term, idiots.