By Professor Doom
I’m grateful to
the founding fathers, and respect their achievement in creating a country, and
greet with some concern the realization that the chances of this country’s
disintegration within my lifetime have grown from “essentially impossible” to
“unlikely” within the last twenty years.
That said, I’ve
never been much of a flag-worshipper. I respect those that hold a piece of
cloth with particular symbols on it as sacred but…to me the actual ideas and
concepts the flag represents are sacred, the flag itself means little to me. I
particularly don’t understand people who go nuts over others destroying an
American flag: the ideals upon which this country was founded include
destroying the flag as part of free speech.
Anyway, I respect
people who use the flag to make a political statement…but that doesn’t mean I
respect the political statement, and yes, sometimes, I think people are idiots
for using the flag in an inappropriate way.
A recent idiocy
I’ve seen, like so much idiocy, comes from higher education, more specifically
tiny Hampshire College, in Massachusetts. I’m hard pressed to wrap my mind
around it:
Hey, there are
plenty of US actions that I can accept refusing the fly the flag for, to raise
awareness. US torture camps, for example, strike me as profane enough to
justify abusing the flag to attract attention. Illegal wars, zero interest
rates from a central bank, the existence of welfare programs…lots of things,
and primarily things that are in violation of what the founding fathers wanted
for this country. What, pray tell, is the college using the flag to protest?
“A day after the
presidential election, the Massachusetts college sided with students who
lowered the flag to half-staff…”
--emphasis
added
Seriously? Flying
the US flag at half-mast in protest for a peacefully resolved US election, as
per the guidelines of the people that designed this country? This is as crazy
as defacing Martin Luther King posters to protest the success of the civil
rights movement.
The half-masting
was a (spineless) concession to students who were heartbroken their candidate
didn’t win. Hey, I’ve been disappointed in the outcome of quite a few
elections…never occurred to me to ask another institution to protest on my
behalf.
The
student-as-customer paradigm has so warped our campuses. Instead of using the
election as a teachable moment, the administration collapsed and just gave the
students what they want, while ignoring the university mission of education.
That’s a big fat
“strike one” for the university admin. Here comes another swing and a miss:
“And when
someone lit the campus' US flag on fire November 10, many more pushed back
after the college decided to do away with flying the American flag, at least
temporarily.”
“Strike two,” big
time. So, some clown decided to burn the flag. Once again, administration had a
choice to either show some spine, or cave in. Hey, I don’t have a problem with
some clown burning his own flag, but that flag was university property, and,
moreover, that flag was being used to make a political statement.
A really, really,
stupid and contradictory political statement, mind you…but the college has that
right, even if the real statement is “we coddle our students and do not teach
them.” If they really had a problem with the way how the US government does
things, after all, they could make a real statement by refusing government back
student loans. Yeah, right.
Once again, the
institution had the opportunity to use something as a teachable moment, by
peacefully and stubbornly buying another flag, and continuing to make their political
statement. You know, kind of like Gandhi, except instead of being beaten,
they’re just flying a flag at half-staff. Imagine if Gandhi had simply cowered
away after the first blow, or if the first civil rights protestors had just
shut up and gone home, to put this in perspective for where admin stands in
terms of spine.
To be fair, after
the flag was burned, the Poo Bah decided to fly the flag again, again in
distress, but for a different reason:
Flying the flag at
half-staff "was meant as an expression of grief over the violent deaths
being suffered in this country and globally, including the many U.S. service
members who have lost their lives," President Jonathan Lash said.
Lash regretted the
college taking that action as it caused some "unintentional distress"
over a traditional expression of mourning, school spokesman John Courtmanche
told CNN.
On Monday, Lash
announced in a Facebook statement that the college had decided on November 18
that no flags, US or otherwise, would fly over campus for the time being. But
students can still fly their own flags.
To call this
behavior idiocy is possibly inaccurate on my part. Is "confusion" a better word?
This weird scramble to justify incoherent behavior is strike three, at the very
least. I’m at a loss for words, but others are more clear in their opinions:
John
Velis, an Army veteran and state representative, called on the college
president to reinstate the US flag immediately.
"The
president's position fundamentally does not make sense to me," Velis told
CNN. "It is baseless, cowardly, a disgrace," he added.
While people are
being outraged over this college’s inane behavior, the outrage is false,
because they think the college is being unpatriotic and disrespectful of the
flag. It might be a sincere outrage, but it’s still false.
The true outrage
is our higher education system has been taken over by a mercenary cast of administrators,
who make every decision in an attempt to appease students, who do everything
they can to get more growth out of the institution, little realizing that
they’re destroying their institutions by abandoning the purposes that made
those institutions great.
The sacrifice of
the flag and the ideals the flag represents, are mere collateral damage in the
endless administrative war for more growth.
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