America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.
Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms–then you can stand up and sing about the ‘Land of the Free’.
Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd
in Rob Reiner’s “The American President” (1995)
at 1:40:03
Yeah, it’s a quote from a movie, but it makes a rather succinct point that most people don’t stop to think about–and it’s dead-on.
(By the way, the picture above isn’t what you think…so shut the fuck up. It’s a picture of The Disposal of Unserviceable Flags Ceremony held each year on Flag Day by American Legion Post 148 in Eatonville, Washington. Suck on that.)