Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Cody Alicea looked a little unnerved as he approached his bicycle Friday afternoon.
The 13-year-old walked into a clutch of news crews, drawn to Denair Middle School after a school employee’s request that Cody remove an American flag from his bike attracted national headlines. The district, in this small Stanislaus County town, reversed its stance Friday.
“I didn’t think it would cause this much attention,” Cody said after unlocking his flag-festooned bicycle. “No one has told me (today) I can’t fly the flag.”
Edward Parraz, superintendent of the Denair Unified School District, said that a campus supervisor asked Cody to remove the flag earlier this week out of concern for his safety.
Those concerns arose from a dust-up among students last school year after some racial tensions arose when Latino students brought Mexican flags to school around Cinco de Mayo.
“It’s one of those things that the campus supervisor was thinking in the best interest of Cody and it backfired on her,” Parraz said Friday. “I think it was the right decision with the wrong result. She feels miserable.”
:
Parents and community members, in the meantime, developed their own plan to walk students to school on Monday morning, flags flying high.“We want to show the nation that this isn’t Denair,” said Cassie Olson, who is helping to organize the walk. Wearing red, white and blue, the parents will escort children down Main Street to the Lester Road middle and high schools.
“I live here. This is my town,” she said.
Okay, now here’s my question. Every now and then we see a story like this where some innocent unsuspecting strutting martinet thinks like a bureaucrat and accidentally stirs up a big ol’ hoop-de-doo over Old Glory…and we get a situation roughly comparable to “I thought it was a pinata, didn’t realize it was a wasp nest.”
Why’s it still happening?
If you were running around looking for some orders to dish out because that’s just the kind of person you are and that’s the kind of authority with which you’ve been entrusted…and the order you wanted to dish out was something along the lines of “don’t talk about the Holocaust as if it really happened” — an alarm bell would go off in your head, right? Just as if you were about to repeat a joke with the “n” word in it. We’ve been working really hard to build a civilized society in which all kinds of alarms go off in people’s heads before they say things.
I do not know if every single time someone acts to constrain the display of the American Flag, it turns into something I hear about. That would involve rendering a judgment that depends on things I might not have heard about. But I do know every time I end up hearing about it, it seems the guy who started the whole thing claims to be surprised at the way things turned out.
Who are these people who are issuing all these decrees and commands, and then getting surprised that someone else is hearing about it and having a problem with it? It seems there is an expectation out there that Americans should not be proud to be Americans. The people who think this are shown something different, they feel awful, and then give it a few weeks or months someone else will be surprised by the same thing.
Kind of like bank robbery. Except, every now and then, a bank robber gets away with it…and the ones that don’t, to the best I recall, don’t claim to be all that surprised at the way things turned out.
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You’ll note that the latest flag-waving incident has its roots in another one last year – foreign students bringing foreign flags onto AMERICAN soil and pridefully waving them around, while attending an institution paid-for by AMERICAN taxpayers. And yet anyone who said that seemed ungrateful, hypocritical, and downright unnecessary was a nasty anti-Latino racist. How dare you attempt to restrain these students’ pride in their country?
Now, some kid waves (actually, he doesn’t wave – he rides around displaying) an American flag, and he does it not defiantly (as with the Mexican flags) but for the most altruistic reason I can imagine – honoring veterans who died for that flag……and the school is all worried about “racial incidents.” I read about that particular concern when I followed a link in someone’s Facebook posting. I noted that the school not only backed-off harassing this kid, they went on to say that they’d be focusing on the students who really were attempting to provoke racial incidents. Imagine that, I said – going after the kids who try to start sh*t, instead of a kid flying the flag of a country, ON that country’s soil. I fly the US flag periodically myself, and all this left me wondering – if some group of “activists” thinks our flag is racist, why is that MY problem?
- cylarz | 11/15/2010 @ 01:39