| The following column was republished in The River Reporter on June 24, 1999. |
By Bert S. Feldman
The Recusant Reporter
I yield to no one my respect and love for the flag of my country. I still feel all choked up when it passes in a parade (where most of the people present don’t even pause to salute or remove their hats). It is that flag that I proudly followed when I wore the uniform of my country, it is the flag that flew over the military hospital where I recuperated, and it is the same banner that still flies from a flagstaff in front of my house every single day. I learned to love it when my father, an immigrant, wrote his basic rule of life in my school autograph album when I graduated: "Always be a joy to your mother and a pride to your flag." But that glorious symbol, per se, is just that — a symbol. It represents freedom as granted to us by such things as our Constitution and its accompanying amendments, especially the first ten, known as the Bill of Rights.
For the right to enjoy this Bill of Rights and its catalog of rights — "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." People have died, and are continuing to die, for the rights to these basic tenets. They must not have died in vain.
There are those among us who do not feel this way about the flag of our country. Their complaints about the government of our country (and there are many causes for such complaints), are expressed by destroying, usually by fire, that beloved flag. I deplore such action and its proponents, but the Constitution of our country says (and I feel that a complete reading of the First Amendment might be in order here) that:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances." As much as we despise those who would burn our flag, as odious as their deeds might be, these people are acting within the framework of the First Amendment. To start picking on specific incidents to pass an additional amendment to curtail the first; therein ties the seeds of destruction of the Constitution.
First you pick on one little part, then something else which got you all riled up, and so go our freedoms. There is, at present, a small clique in congress that wants to change the Constitution to read that Protestantism should be declared the religion of this country. Other groups want other restrictions and/or changes.
Our present Supreme Court, certainly as conservative a legal body as we have had in many a moon, has wisely seen the perils in this current hysteria, and voted five to four against any such tampering. President Bush, who in the past has wrapped himself in the flag, is urging congress, already inflamed by the current hysteria of their constituents, to pass a Constitutional amendment condemning flag burning. There are already state and local laws governing such behavior. Let’s keep calm and start using our heads and not our hearts. This is not the first time that mass hysteria has caused the president and congress to stop thinking (if they ever really did.) Following the First World War, a red "Bolshevik" scare brought on the Palmer raids where large numbers of American citizens suspected of Communist sympathies were arrested, many without due process of law. This hysteria was repeated in the ’50’s with the paranoia of Senator "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy.
In 1798, congress, afraid of the "radical" beliefs of those citizens who supported Thomas Jefferson, voted into being the infamous Alien and Sedition Act, which empowered the president to expel "dangerous" aliens, and which further allowed the president to arrest any person(s) who wrote or spoke "with intent to defame" the government, the congress or the president.
Perhaps some wise congressperson, an oxymoron if I every heard one, might be able to introduce a bill to have engraved over the door to their august chambers, the famous quote of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it."
