Nobody has died defending the USA flag, as it’s just a symbol or icon of our freedom; a trademark, so to speak. It must not be that important, as I’ve seen right-wing cowboys wearing USA flag shirts, and you know how dirty cowboys can get. They’re soiling the flag, or something that looks like the flag — they must be anti-American socialists!

However, many soldiers have died defending the USA’s freedom, and depending on which war they were in, they weren’t even doing that; they died either defending another country’s freedom or political aspirations, and sometimes strictly for the USA’s political reasons, or corporate greed/gain, or simply to continue asserting our stature as the leader of the free world, which I’m fine with — I just don’t want to see us interfering with civil wars in other countries unless there is prima facie, bona fide evidence that should the wrong side win the war, our peace will be threatened. Vietnam was considering to the first domino that if it fell, the rest of SE Asia would turn communist with it (which didn’t happen), or that China would control SE Asia (no again), and that foreign communist governments were something to fear. Communism doesn’t work in the long run anyway, so why fight it — let it fold like a flan on its own.

We are a country with or without a flag. When I say this, I exercise one of the rights our soldiers fought for, which is freedom of speech. I don’t agree with flag burning simply out of respect, but I agree with the right to do it as a form of speech, be it misguided.

Once we start limiting our freedom of expression, the next question is, which freedom do we limit or take away next? There is no limit to fascism.