Trump Reignites Burning Issue (see what I did there?)

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

Today, I didn’t have to actually scroll through the headlines to find something sufficiently irritating to write about; instead I merely had to look at the top, featured story on Yahoo News; which was a detailed examination of the history and implications of President-Elect Trump’s idiotic ideas about punishing people for burning the flag with prison and possible loss of citizenship.

I didn’t even want to click on it or read it. This whole issue smacks of high school debate club to me. I had to force myself to read the story, and doing so was actually a bit horrifying; the fact it’s only been since 1989 that the Supreme Court has struck down all state-level laws making burning or desecrating the flag a crime is absurd, really. Equally absurd is the relative newness of it being difficult-to-impossible for the government to revoke someone’s citizenship for “un-American” ideas or activities. The Supreme Court rulings on that matter are as recent as the 1970s.

While those questions now should be a matter of settled law, it appears that Donald Trump might reopen those cans of worms; and his hinting at is has already caused all manner of speculation among the mainstream media, which seemingly lives to speculate about only really trivial things.

The simple fact is that no one should be talking about this because it’s completely unimportant. There are strong feelings on both sides, yes, but only one can be right, and it’s not the die-hard nationalists. Sorry. It’s a piece of cloth that represents a nation founded on the notion of individual liberty. One of those individual liberties is the right to free speech and expression. There are always going to be examples of expression some people find disagreeable. For instance, merely hearing rap music tends to make me agitated. That being said, I support the right of people to make awful, boring noises and then sell them to people who are into that shit for whatever reason. I wouldn’t support any effort to use the government’s monopoly on violence to suppress the creation of said “music,” even though I literally cannot stand it.

The above is the sort of mindset adults need to possess and the sort of tolerance we all must extend one another in order for this whole civilization thing to work out. We must all remember that one’s rights do not end where another’s feelings begin, but rather where another’s rights begin. We all have the right to not be harmed physically or financially by another’s actions. No one is harmed by the burning of a flag, any flag; ergo, no one’s rights are violated by it. As such, government has exactly no right criminalizing any such act.

Of course, this is 21^st Century America, so, obviously the above ‘graph doesn’t actually describe how our laws work; you just can’t be number one in penal system participation per capita worldwide that way. So, because our laws are inherently philosophically bankrupt, the populace is sufficiently confused as to what laws ought be and what the proper function of government is, that it actually sounds “reasonable” to punish someone for burning a bit of cloth. So “reasonable,” in fact, that despite my strong wishes to the contrary, I’ve just spent 548 more words than I ever wanted to writing about it.