It was never about the flag.

It was never about the national anthem, either.

Last week, unfortunately, it may have been more about the president of the United States calling protesting NFL players “SOBs” who should be threatened with job loss if they take a knee in silent protest over police brutality and systemic racism than it was about those two sad realities of American life that we all know exist, whether we care to admit it to ourselves or not.

So now what?

The message Colin Kaepernick silently delivered 13 months ago when he first sat down to protest racial injustice seems to have been lost among talk of flags, anthems, disrespect and now unity. Unity around what, exactly?

Those who fear the kind of volatile debate such issues raise have successfully run an end around on the real issue that has so many professional athletes and average Americans concerned. The issue is not disrespecting the flag or ignoring the anthem or insulting the military. It’s not even about unity because you can’t have 300 people, let alone 300 million, agree on much of anything these days.

In a nutshell, the issue is that some Americans have to instruct their children how to act if approached by a policeman to avoid getting shot, a conversation I’ve never felt the need to have with my own children and no white person I know has either. As former NFL lineman Mark Schlereth said yesterday on ESPN, “Never even thought about it.” He then went on to quote Spurs coach Gregg Popovich pointing out “every black friend I have has had that conversation.”

“That’s a sad statement of where we are as a country,” Schlereth said. He went on to say the demonstrations by NFL players are not about disrespecting the flag. They’re recognizing there still are inequalities in our country and asking we all think about that and try doing something about it. Hopefully, one day soon, many of us will unify around that.

To those who say, “it’s not the right time or place” to do it when the anthem is being played, Schlereth rightly asked, “What is the right place and time? Where you can’t see it so it doesn’t make an impact on you?”

He then asked an interesting question. He asked what would have happened if Rosa Parks had simply written a strongly worded letter to the bus company in Alabama saying she didn’t like sitting in the back of the bus instead of being arrested for refusing to do so?

“Nothing would have happened,” Schlereth said.

He’s right, of course. Change comes only out of discomfort. It comes from understanding others’ discomfort over things you do not understand and out of your own discomfort seeking a new direction. That is what taking a knee is really about — creating enough discomfort for people to hear a reality they’d rather believe doesn’t exist and taking action to change it, which is always the hardest part.

That some NFL players have chosen to make that point in a way that has made others uncomfortable doesn’t make them “SOBs,” nor should it make them unemployable. If the owners who pay them choose to support their players’ rights to protest for social justice by taking a knee or standing arm-in-arm with them, as some did last Sunday while others cowered in the safety of their luxury boxes and issued half-hearted statements of . . . whatever, so be it. It doesn’t mean those proactive owners are “afraid of their employees,” as President Donald Trump suggested. Nor does it mean they totally agree with them. It means they’re listening not just hearing. Those aren’t the same thing, by the way, as our children remind us daily.

It may also mean they respect their employees, a respect the president has not shown for many of his own employees in the White House, but Trump is a clever man. I learned that back in the day when he was staging fights in Atlantic City, often in partnership with Don King.

Trump knows how to distract and deflect. He knows how to lie, too, which many a successful promoter has done to confuse the public out of its money. It’s what they do best.

In the NFL’s case, a silent protest begun in opposition to racial injustice is now being sold by the president and others as an effort to insult the military and demean the flag. What these players originally began doing was to use a very public moment to silently say, “We got some problems over here. Can we self-scout ourselves? Can we fix a system that when we talk about crack it’s a crime, but when you talk about opiate abuse it’s a social issue? Can we create a society where I don’t have to instruct my kids how to avoid being shot if approached by a police officer?”

This Sunday NFL players must again decide what they’re going to do. Are they going to stand up, kneel down, link arms, cover their hearts or do the hokey pokey during “The Star-Spangled Banner?” Like all of us, they’re going to have to decide what they’re fighting for too? Are they protesting the president’s threatening comments or racial injustice? Are they concerned with societal unity or just team unity?

Many NFL players, including Tom Brady, have said they believe Kaepernick deserves an NFL job and hope he gets one. The league’s 32 owners all said last week they stood with their players. So when are those players going to say: If he can’t play, we won’t play? And when will one of those owners say, “I’ll hire the guy because he took a team to the Super Bowl, and my guy can’t take us to dinner without costing my team.”

Solving this seemingly endless problem of mistrust and misunderstanding has to start somewhere. So how about the NFL starts by giving a guy back a job we all know he’s entitled to. That won’t solve society’s ills concerning racial injustice, and it won’t make us unified, either. But we’ve got to start somewhere.