Visceral Emotion Threatens What the Flag Represents

My personal position on flag burning is DON'T. It is a practice that brings out the whackadoo in otherwise rational people.

Interestingly, no one ever mentions the fact that the only way to dispose of a desecrated flag is to burn it, and ours has been desecrated by the blood of innocents. Some folks just lose it when a flag is burned. We have way to much irrational, emotional stuff going on as it is.

If one feels that the flag is the only tool for expressing their dismay/outrage and what is happening in this country, fly it upside down, an internationally recognized symbol of distress.

Visceral Emotion Threatens What the Flag Represents:

"As the U.S. Senate contributed mightily to global warming while debating a constitutional amendment to ban flag-desecration last week, the Citizens Flag Alliance ('representing 147 organizations and more than 20 million members') made this startling announcement: Flag-desecration incidents are up 33 percent this year. That is, there have been four incidents reported so far this year, compared with three by June last year.

And those four incidents? Early in the morning of June 22 on a residential Brooklyn street, louts thought to be teens just out of school set on fire a few flags in people's yards. Two weeks earlier, a drunken man in West Haven, Conn., desecrated a flag while chugging beer and taunting passers-by on a bike path. On May 30, vandals stole a flag from a VFW Post in Mineville, N.Y., and burned it. And on May 13 in a small New Hampshire town, 13 flags hanging from a VFW building were sliced into ribbons.

Each of these, except the drunken man's desecration (he could be prosecuted for drinking beer in public, but not messing with a flag) are misdemeanors punishable by perfectly acceptable laws: You can't go around destroying other people's yard property, whether it's a flag or a pink flamingo. But are three instances of stupid vandalism and one drunken hiccup a crisis warranting the mobilization of the U.S. Senate and the push for the first constitutional amendment in 14 years? "