You can count on
it! Every time politicians are embarrassed
about a recent decision or announcement, they'll
stoke up some smoke-screen issue in an attempt to
obscure the fact that they've just done something
stupid. Again. When Democrats as a group
are embarrassed, it's usually because they're uneasy
talking about tax hikes to pay for government
spending. Republicans, as a rule, have lots
more to worry about. Often associated with
debt-driven economic schemes to enrich the wealthy, dismantling
popular programs, looking the other way while industry fouls the
environment, shielding big business from employee and
customer complaints, and frequent attempts to get
government into the religion business, conservatives
have a greater variety of reasons to keep a supply of
smokescreen issues at the ready. This time, in 2000, it's the failure of the Republican-dominated Congress,
acting as a rubber stamp for the NRA, to respond to
public demand for positive action in the wake of
deadly violence in the nation's public schools, which
has prompted the need for a quick cover.
Eager to distract
attention from his party's unwillingness to deal
forthrightly with the problem of school children
being killed, one conservative congressman once again
trotted out the old flag-desecration amendment
proposal. He eloquently ran on about how
American veterans fought for their country's flag,
and that desecrating that flag dishonored those who
had died for it. To pose a concise but not so
eloquent response to this myopic little politician in
the everyday phraseology of the average American
soldier, "Bullshit!" What soldiers do in defense of
liberty can never be dishonored by the act of a flag burner.
However, all those soldiers' sacrifices can be rendered null and
void by small-minded political demagogues acting to dismember the
Constitution's Bill of Rights.
That's the real danger!
Suppose we see flames,
and discover that it is not the flag, but our house
which is burning. And suppose we are faced with
the unhappy choice of rescuing either our children or
their baby pictures from the inferno. We might
regret the loss of the pictures, but we'd sacrifice
them to save the kids without flinching, wouldn't
we? This politician, on the other hand,
proposes the moral equivalent of saving the pictures
and letting the children burn!
American veterans (at
least this one, and numerous others he
knows) have not risked their lives for a piece of
cloth. To say that they have insults both their
intelligence and their motives, and trivializes their
sacrifices. The service of American fighting
men and women to their country is to preserve, not a
mere symbol of liberty, but the reality
of it. To us it is not a rectangle of fabric
which is truly important, but the principles of
liberty, including the freedom to speak and believe
in accordance with one's own conscience. Even
if one's beliefs are unpopular. Even if one's
words are critical of the government. And yes,
even if the methods one chooses to express one's
ideas are misguided and counterproductive.
The right to speak one's
mind, even if one makes a fool of oneself in doing
so, that is the heart and soul of America. The
flag is merely a trimming—pretty, but
inconsequential in comparison. It's not a
piece of cloth that makes America what it is, but
the ideas set forth in its Constitution. If a
flag is burned, we can always stitch up
another. But if the ideas and values enshrined
in the Constitution are shredded, then America will
no longer be an America worth fighting and dying for.
Certainly we revere the
Stars and Stripes as the symbol of that
liberty. But a flag can easily be replaced;
liberty itself cannot. We honor and salute the
flag, not for what it is, but for what it represents.
We are not so foolish as to confuse the symbol with
the principle itself. If a situation arises
presenting a choice between preserving one or the
other, we know which must be protected.
Those, who'd trample
the right of free speech in an effort to save a mere
symbol of that right, should consider that in the absence of the
ideals it represents, a symbol is worth nothing!
=SAJ=