It was announced on Monday evening (Nov. 24) that Officer
Darren Wilson would not be indicted on charges in the shooting death of
teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. This didn’t really come as a shock to
many who had been keeping up with the case, but it still sent Ferguson into an
eruption of looting and other unacceptable forms of public displeasure. The
peaceful protests that had taken place, and been horribly interrupted with
police over-stepping their bounds in the summer, had been taken over on Monday
night by a small band of instigators who simply wanted to cause as much trouble
as they could. And they did, leaving much of Ferguson in flames.
This, of course, set the Internet ablaze, but it was the
blaze of America’s favorite symbol – the red, white and blue that set another
sect of the Internet into fiery passionate rants. Burning the American flag trended
on Twitter for much of the night with many people outraged over the fact that
anybody would do something so horrendous in protest. The only problem here is
that people didn’t seem to have much of a clue what they were talking about.
Now, I don’t care much for flag burning. It’s not a form of
protest that I’d ever feel the need to partake in. In fact, as a sports fan,
one of my many, many favorite sports tidbits or stories is the time Arkansas’
own Rick Monday, playing with the Chicago Cubs, saved a flag from being burned
in the outfield of Dodger Stadium when two protesters ran into the outfield and
were about to set it on fire before Monday swooped in and saved the day. However,
I will defend the right for people to burn the American flag, because it’s a
form of freedom of speech and thus protected by the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution.
This is a fact that a lot of people on the Internet failed
to understand. They were saying things like ‘burning the American flag is
illegal’ and ‘It pisses me off
that they were burning the American flag. It's disrespect to all the veterans who fought for your rights.’
Well, sorry
ladies and gentleman. You can disagree with flag burning all you want. But,
believe it or not, we as American citizens actually do have the right to burn
our flag. Thus, those veterans who fought for our rights were also fighting for
that very right, as well.
Certain people
like to pick and choose the U.S. Constitution. For instance, they love the
Second Amendment because it protects their right to bear arms, but then hate
the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and so on and so forth. This picking
and choosing of the Constitution really burns me, because it’s always the
people holding it up as America’s Bible or the ‘Law of the Land that Should
Never Ever Change No Matter How Much the World Around Us Does’ who end up
bitching about it when somebody decides they want to burn a flag.
The people
burning the American flag on Monday night where doing so because they feel this
country has turned its back on them for too long and this was a form of protest
that showed their displeasure. This is a feeling so many of us could not even
begin to understand. Maybe if we could understand it just a little bit we’d
realize there were more important things going on in this world than a few
people burning a colored piece of fabric.
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