Will we see players kneel?

[Dill]

(09-25-2017, 03:46 PM)jason Wrote: Do you guys suppose that it's this way in other countries too? Like in Albania or Chile or wherever... Does everything that goes on with their flag or national anthem come back around to the military or veterans? Do the common folk of other nations worship their flag like we seem to do? Am I the only one who doesn't immediately associate the American flag with veterans or the military in general.

I think it depends on the country. 

Lots of people love their flag when they see it flying with their Olympic team or with their World Cup team. 

But I don't think it's very common that people in other countries burn flags or use them in protest of their own government (though they burn other countries flags--like the US and Russia's). That is in part because they are not required to salute them, and in part because the flag isn't made to represent specific political programs of specific parties the way it is in the US.

Veterans are a separate, special group in this country, where only a small percentage ever wear the uniform and we fight a lot of wars. In many other countries, there is universal conscription, so after a certain age everyone is a veteran. Nothing special. There aren't veterans policies and the like.

In authoritarian cultures where people are required to publicly reverence the flag, like North Korea, they don't dare burn it. The sons of bitches would be fired, and more.

But one difference between the US and other countries concerns the kind of claims the US makes about itself. It represents itself as a city on the hill, as a model for other countries in respect of political equality and opportunity. So far as I know, Chileans and Albanians do not do that.

2nd point. The US fought a war with southern states who had their own flag. The Stars and Stripes thereafter was object of reverence by Unionists and vilification by former Confederates. It promised the slaves freedom and represented Northern "aggression." Also in the 1890s came the first state statues against flag desecration, though these were often aimed at commercial uses of the flag, like putting it on beer bottles and the like. After WWI, the US started making people salute the flag and pledge allegiance to it in schools.

Post WWII especially, some politicians have identified the US and its "exceptionalist" claims with the flag in a way not found in most other countries. And they have represented their platform with the flag, so that if you are rejecting their platform, you are rejecting the flag, the US, and God, whom we have been one nation under since 1954. This makes the flag itself a means of multiple political statements in a way it is not in other countries.  People who burn the flag or refuse to stand or salute it may be protesting some specific policy of some group wrapping itself in the flag, but more frequently they claim the US is not living up to its ideals. To anti-protestors this is disrespecting all the flag stands for, including people who died for "freedom" and "rights."  That usually muddles any discussion of how the US may not be living up to its ideals. Some people grasp the contradiction entailed by preventing someone from exercising his/her right to free speech because people died for it; some do not.

Thus the flag becomes a means of manipulating and orchestrating emotion for political purposes.