>>When America’s fallen come from the Middle East they arrive at Dover Air Force Base in caskets covered with a star-spangled banner. When they are buried the flag is removed, elegantly folded, and given to a spouse, child, sibling, or parent.
>>You stand for the National Anthem. You kneel to pray for the country. Doing otherwise identifies you as feckless, arrogant, self-absorbed. Whatever cause or grievance you think you have becomes squalid and frivolous.
I could be wrong, but here’s why I disagree with you. The two polar opposites that our nation has become has placed the flag on the list of things we disagree about. They say that it is a symbol of oppression. You say that it is a symbol of the dead.
But America is neither. It is a nation where the law is more important than feelings or contemporary ideas. We honor the dead, but value the living much more. It is a nation that can start out with slaves, fight a horrible war with itself to fix that, and then reform into a single nation again. It is a nation where we can argue or agree to disagree, but no one can tell you that you cannot have a particular opinion. It is nation where every person is nobility by European standards. It is a nation where the Puritan work ethic is ingrained into our psyches and defeatist european slogans don’t even exist until recently when we invented “What...everrrr”.
Yes, people died to make that happen and to preserve it. But people also LIVED to make that happen and to preserve it. I don’t stand for the flag because of dead people because they have received their reward already.
I stand because America is a unique nation in the history of nations and when it falls, what we have will never exist again on earth.
I certainly don’t disagree with anything you said. I got to the end of the one thought and decided that brevity might help the letter get published. It didn’t.