by JOHN STANTON
What’s the point in Stars and Stripes flying full staff anymore? What joy or pride is there in looking up at the American Flag when it seems that each week it is lowered for this and that death, current or past? And knowing that over the last three decades or so, most of those deaths and sacrifices would turn out to be at the altar of dismal failure (except for those promoted or who profited in stock and US dollars).
One day the US flag is down by half in remembrance of September 11, 2001, another day it is downed for those murdered in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and yet another day for an ambassador killed in action in Libya, and yet another day for college students killed on a campus in Virginia. Inevitably it will be lowered for former presidents President George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter and who knows who else.
Just as torture has lost meaning in America, so has the American flag (and what it represents) lost its inspiration. Even the Bald Eagle, America’s Number One bird, had to be saved from American hunters, DDT and other pollutants (thanks to the US government).
The US Flag should remain at half-mast every day for all those who have died and or were wounded in the largely senseless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for all those unknown American soldiers dead/wounded in Foreign Internal Defense or Kill-Capture operations on the African Continent, the Philippines, Mexico and a host of other countries where the US attempts to secure its economic interests.
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The American Flag should be packed away for a time because there is no United States of America. There are States in a sort of ad hoc union in these rough and tumble times in which American political, economic, cultural and military leadership ignores critical domestic issues and is quite happy to play abroad in the sandboxes of Africa and the Middle East while the Homeland burns. It is a leadership that watches as domestic unemployment grows, infrastructure collapses and public education is assaulted. Just as the flag is up one day and down the next, America’s leadership is this way on an issue on Tuesday and then that way on Wednesday. Why not lower the American Flag for those who will never find another job to pay the rent, or those 25 million children living in poverty.
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