The flag controversy . . .

After several seemingly interminable weeks of melancholy exchanges amid the argue-around-the-flagpole issue on this editorial page, it appears to be time to rush in where only the Recusant Reporter ordinarly treads.

First, some ground rules need to be stated. Editorials in this publication are solely the responsibility of whoever happens to be using our widely modified title of editor on that given week. They do not, by and large, represent the collective wisdom or opinion of staff or management. This paragraph is an exception to that rule.

Secondly, like most Americans, this writer is not happy about the oft mentioned Supreme Court decision, but like many of that same number, is also not at all sure how to remedy it.

Those who would defend the Court say that the fact that an indiidual has the right to burn the flag, is testiment to the strength of what it symbolizes. Perhaps, but because of the peculiar nature of our flag, I believe that strength will suffer with mistreatment.

Our flag has always been a changing design, representing the growth of a nation. Now given the diverse nature of our society, it has become one of the few things that represents community for most Americans. I can say from experience that the Pledge is about the only thing that is universally accepted at most local government meetings.

Because of the flag's ability to rise above everyday political squabbling, its symbolic destruction goes deeper than political protest in many minds. We can yell at our politicians, damn their policies to their faces, and hang them in effigy if we like. But in destroying the flag, we're going beyond protesting temporal government. They we're saying: destroy the system that allows the protest. That's self-destruction, and I'm not sure I'm ready to go yet.

I would readily agree with Ms. Shame's (7/13) premise that President Bush drop his notion for a Constitutional amendment. If defacement of the flag is obnoxious, shoot-from-the-hip tinkering with the Constitution is downright dangerous.

Maybe a stiff environmental law against the burning of all cloth and rags is called for.
. . . Judeo-Christian Guilt Ethic

Given Shames' stated cultural and ethnic background I can also understand her mixed feelings about the flag and her distress at finding anonymous flags decorating her property. Property, which I'm certain she acquired in much the same way as the rest of us in this valley.

I'm not however, willing to accept Shames' vision of the Delaware Valley as on eof the last battlegrounds for the Native American's right to remain on his or her own land. I'm not sure who are Native Americans and whatever Joseph Brant may have done later, he was on a mercenary guerilla raid when he fought here in 1779.

Neither will I accept the beaded mantle of guilt with which my colleague, Mr. Rue, adorned himself in last week's editorial.

Anthropologists tell us that the people who became known as American Indians migrated across a land bridge from Asia in prehistoric times. If there was any earlier culture here to meet them, they assimiliated or destroyed it, and we have no record of them.

Without question, the Europeans who came later treated the people they found here shabbily. In some cases, worse than they had themselves been treated by their own kind in Europe, before coming here. But the strong tok from the weak and that wasn't new or isolated to their time. Today, law more closely inhibits eviction and seizure by force, but we're still only entitled to hold what we can maintain. Ignore your tax bills and see what happens.

Yes indeed: "Hip hip hooray! We won." Consider the alternative before you discard it. I recall no notice of any editor offering to return his property to earlier inhabitatants.

Last and least comes my colleague's inclusion of the Battle of Minisink into his panorama of genocide. The Battle of Minisink was a wayside, largely inconsequential skirmish in the American Revolution. It bore about as much relationship to the terrible history of the white man's mistreatment of red men as did the songs of the Andres Sisters to the outcome of World War II.

Those who now gather there under the flag on July 22nd, do annually preface their commemoration with the reminder that the remembrance is for all those who died there. No one differentiates among the inept militia, the white majority, tories -- or the ancestral enemies of the Lenni Lenape, the Mohawks. They are all dead together.

Self-flagellation and hair shirts donned by modern Americans won't change a bit of the past. Without the modern Chinese facility to rewrite history, we're stuck with its shortcomings. We're better advised to let the sins of the dead rest with them. Our clocks only go one way, so lets get on with it, and let our remembrance of their triumphs as well as their mistakes provide a guide for something better.

-- David Hulse, Associate Editor

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:
Dear President Bush:

At 6:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, July 1, 1989, I was greeted by a row of small plastic United States flags standing at attention by each mailbox along my road. On my drive down the hill to picku up the paper and a quart of milk, I saw the same plastic color guard lining my way. Who had planted them, what did they mean by it?

I cringed with fear and discomfort at the sight. Coming so soon after your proposal of a Constitutional amendment to make defacement of the flag illegal, I felt uneasy about this expression of patriotism.

To punctuate my fear, friends and loved ones cautioned about the advisability of openly expressing my opinions for fear of making myself the target of zealous patriots, encouraged by your proposal, to express what they felt was right. I was reminded of the hostility, rage and even violence that has been shown to people in our area who expressed dissenting ideas.

Their concern convinced me that I must speak out.

Ironically, I chose to live near the Delaware River, surrounded by plaquest commemorating a battle that marked my people's final struggles to remain in our own land. The plaques carry the name of the chief who spent the rest of his days searching for a new home for his people until they finally ended their search on the banks of the Grand River. My heart was wounded as my neighbors celebrated our defeat in a ceremony commemorating the Battle of Minisink Ford.

But I was schooled in this country's public school system and I learned to cherish the ideals behind the United States Constitution. I comforted myself with the thought that some good came from my family's adversity. I rejected the nationalistic symbolism behind this country's flag which only serves to separate us from other people of the world. I chose instead to claim the flag as a universal symbol of the ideals which I cherished.

The problem is not that there are people in the world whose anger and pain bring them to burn the United States flag but that, to them, the flag symbolizes all the pain and oppression that stunted their lives. I know from my personal experience how raw and embittering that symbolism can be. I overcame that bitterness by believing in the flag that stands for the right of dissent which includes the right to burn it.

The problem is that the flag stands for evil to some people. A remedy to flag burning and defacement is to work to create a living testimony to the ideals that you claim it embodies.

I beg you to drop the Constitutional amendment and instead use the power of your office to inspire the citizens of this country to honor the ideals for which the flag stands. Surely, you can find amore meaningful way to honor the flag than the peopl who planted the little flags that we will carelessly toss out with the rest of this week's trash.
Jay C. Shames
Barryville

To the Editor:
Dear Ms. Shames:

The thought to place an American flag in front of every house in the Town of Highland was conceived well before the now controversial flap arising over the Supreme Court's decision.

Some twenty of your neighbors, including myself, thought it would be a great way to celebrate our Independence Day by giving a small flag to each of our residents. We began our task between 3 and 6 a.m. so that our neighbors would wake to find those flags to greet them. We had a most enjoyable time performing our little mystery.

Apparently, there are those who cannot accept or understand a straight forward and simple gesture for what it was -- an expression of joy for living in this great nation. The purpose of this effort was not so dramatic as to call for a Constitutional amendment or to renounce the Supreme Court's decision, it was merely one community's way of recognizing that America provides the opportunity for many choices and our choice was to honor and display the flag.

Unfortunately, there are those who may choose to toss the flag out, as you say, "with the rest of the week's trash." I find this type of remark and sentiment really crass and offensive, but such is your business and your right to so remark.

Nevertheless, in anticipation that there are those who might be thoughtless, those flags which were not picked up by the homeowners are to be collected by the original distributors for future use in appropriate ways.
Andrew Boyar, Supervisor
Town of Highland

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