The arrested man identified himself as a combat veteran and said he was burning the American flag in protest of an executive order Trump signed Monday targeting flag burning.
The arrested man identified himself as a combat veteran and said he was burning the American flag in protest of an executive order Trump signed Monday targeting flag burning.
I don’t even understand what is so offensive about flag burning. It’s something teenagers and sheltered young adults do as a feeble form of symbolic rebellion. Genuinely, who cares? It’s not like the flag has some kind of mystical power. It’s not the original version. 9/10, it’s just a cheap copy that was purchased specifically for that demonstration.
I’m a grown man. Why the fuck do I care about teenagers skateboarding in the church parking lot? I got my own problems.
Plus that flag was statistically likely to be made not in the USA
100% this. I remember when some dopey kid tried to burn the flag at a campus I was at, and one of my roommates was simply beside himself with fury over it.
I thought the whole thing was a great big bowl of wrong. The dumbass that was “protesting” was butthurt about something that had nothing to do with America or the flag, IIRC. He just wanted to be edgy or whatever. But the fury from the reactionaries, including my roommate - hilarious.
My roommate even wrote a letter of outrage to the administration. I mean, he was literally beet red with rage over it. His letter tried to work in the “fire safety” angle too, because deep down, even the dumbass reactionary knew the law when it comes to freedom.
When you make kids swear allegiance to a piece of cloth for years, you get stuff like that.
Yeah, I was surrounded by many of them during K-12. We had to stand and pledge allegiance every single day. I usually mumbled my way through it in the early years. At some point, I just stopped doing the mumbling any more. It felt so mindless and cultish.
I remember some girl in high school doing some mock outrage at seeing me doing this, but more in a flirty way, like “you’re so baaaaad, boy!” kind of way.
Luckily I had parents that did a lot of the Lord’s work in counter-brainwashing when I was at home, LOL, so none of the “stand for the anthem and reciting the pledge” every morning at government school (with the 1950s red scare phrase added in, mind you to scare away the godless commies!) didn’t really stick.
I’m still patriotic as HELL. And I love this country’s supposed ideals and founding documents like nobody’s business. But not in the way the brainless cons think of “patriotism”. Their false patriotism is a pantload.
It wasn’t CMU, was it?
No, this was Penn State, ages ago. I don’t think it made the papers or anything that I know of. Probably not even a police report. Some dumbazz tried to light a flag with a Zippo apparently - several students, including some associates, classmates and friends of mine saw him try it. It was inside a dorm building.
Obviously people restrained him/separated the flag from his Zippo, not because they were fighting for gawd, mom, apple pie and the MURICAN FLAG, but because it’s a pretty fucking stupid idea to burn a piece of cloth inside of a building…
Neither my roommate and I were there. No flag was actually burned or even really charred as I understand it. I’m pretty sure it was his own flag. But my roommate who heard about it just about popped a blood vessel over it, LOL. And not really the blatant fire safety aspect. That’s when I saw first-hand just how irrational some people are about other people exercising freedoms.
Dang. That’s nuts but seems right for teenagers lol. I ask because the same thing happened at CMU in like 2002, but it did make the papers. The whole city turned it into a fucking thing.