For my own deeply personal reasons, if I saw an American flag being burned, I would probably rush to rescue it, by force if necessary. I know that I would not be able to stop myself. I would, I guess, be exercising my right of self-expression.
Still, the political pandering of those who would foist a flag burning amendment on us disgusts me. Chicken hawks, in particular, disgust me. George Bush in a jumpsuit really disgusts me.
Moonbeam nailed it: "The flag stands for freedom and the day you can't burn it is the day you should."
Nevertheless, I grew up believing in every good thing about egalitarian, Jeffersonian democracy for which Old Glory has ever waved. I would have layed down my life for those ideals, for that flag. Sadly, I enjoyed the bittersweet privelege of knowing all too many young men -- boys, really -- who did.
Would that they had heeded the great English WWI poet Wilfred Owen, who, not long after he wrote Dulce Et Decorum Est, lost his life, for King and Country. It describes a fellow Tommy who didn't get his gas mask on in time.
Below is the end of that poem:
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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