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'You aren't listening': Philadelphia Eagles player greeted press with signs and silence.

After the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles were uninvited from their scheduled visit to the White House in early June 2018, star safety Malcolm Jenkins decided to try something different when asked by the media about player protests.

He greeted them with silence — instead answering questions with a series of signs.


"YOU AREN'T LISTENING," he wrote in all caps. And to be fair, there's good reason to believe they aren't.

Nearly two years after Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police brutality, some people still don't get the message, wrongly believing that the gesture was intended as a show of disrespect toward the national anthem, the flag, the military, the police, or some combination thereof.

For almost a year now, President Donald Trump has been railing against the league and players who have dared to participate in protests under this false pretense.

It's no wonder that Jenkins — who devotes his free time to visiting prisons, working to improve police-community engagement, and speaking with lawmakers about racial injustice — is sick of having to answer basic questions of what these protests are all about.

Rodney McLeod, Malcolm Jenkins, and Chris Long stand during the national anthem at an October 2017 game. No member of the team kneeled in protest during the 2017 season. Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images.

With poster board and a marker, Jenkins got his message out, focusing on the issues.

"More than 60% of people in prison are people of color," read one of his signs. "Nearly 200,000 juveniles enter the adult criminal system each year, most for non-violent crimes. #StopSchoolPipelineToPrison," read another.

Image from Malcolm Jenkins/Twitter.

On other cards, he played up the off-field work he, his teammates, and friends do to support their causes: the million dollars Kaepernick has given to charity, Chris Long's massive donation to education, and Ben Watson's and Demario Davis' work for voting rights with Louisiana House Bill 265.

Image from Malcolm Jenkins/Twitter.

There's a lot of injustice in the world, and Jenkins is using his platform to try to help. His attitude should be one to emulate, not scorn.

The day of the scheduled White House visit, Jenkins outlined some of his frustrations with the media's tendency to frame NFL players as "anti-America, anti-flag and anti-military."

"It takes empathy and time to listen to others' experiences that may be different than your own,"he wrote. "It takes courage to stand up for the TRUTH even if it's not a popular one."

He's putting in the work to try to help people who don't have it so easy. He's using his voice (or, in this case, his marker) to lift up the concerns of people society often ignores. He's doing the work we'd all be proud to see our family, neighbors, and elected officials doing.

So why is Jenkins being slammed as ungrateful and spoiled?

Maybe he's right: People aren't listening. It's time they started. We could all learn a lot from his example.

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ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

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If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

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The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

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Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

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@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

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Canva

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Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

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A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

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Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

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