Senator Kerry, Let's Go Take Back Our Flag!

by Patricia Ernest

 OpEdNews.Com

It's been almost four years of hell and it's time to make a change.  We've experienced being attacked by a group of people who wanted to make an egregious statement.  Almost three thousand people were killed as a result.  It wasn't just Americans who died on September 11, 2001, there were people from many nations killed in the World Trade Center.  After those attacks, we all flew our flags.  We too wanted to make a statement.  We wanted the world to know that we were the United States of anger.  We had a mission.  We wanted to find bin Laden, the man who claimed to have planned and arranged for the attacks.  When bush hopped up on the rubble with the megaphone, he was the leader of a pissed off nation.  We weren't alone in our pissed off-ness.  All the other countries were with us that day.  Remember how you cried when our national anthem was played by other countries and their citizens cried for us and with us, and for all of those who had perished as a result of the attacks?  God, we were one that day, weren't we?

Then something happened, and it wasn't good.  Bush used our flag, our country and that day as a pass to become the meanest son of a bitch on the planet.  He took the opportunity of that awful day to become an awful President.  He used it like a badge.  Everything that he has done since that day, he has excused because of that day.  Going into Afghanistan to find Al Qaeda was fairly understood, because he told us that was where bin Laden was hiding.  But then something wasn't working as it should - he couldn't find Osama bin Laden.  Rather than telling us that this bin Laden character was one feisty dude and difficult to pin down, he changed the rules of the game and took our soldiers to Iraq in search of Saddam.  He took our flag with him as he marched in and invaded Iraq.  It seemed now that the flag could only be flown by those on the right side of the war. 

Americans who weren't paying close attention got all confused and thought that Saddam was involved in 9-11.  Bush can claim full responsibility for that, because he only added to the confusion with his obfuscation.  He hid his reasons behind our flag.  We were no longer one with the world.  We were the lone country of bush and war, and we were hated.  That's when we noticed that our flag was missing.

What bush didn't mention when he was getting the country all worked up about Saddam was that we were basically going to destroy a country "the size of California", and then we would have to rebuild it at our expense.  We bombed people and we bombed buildings only later to "find" Saddam in a hole in the ground.  We pretty much destroyed the hell out of Iraq, then we adopted Iraq, and now we have to spend money that we don't have to make it all nice again.  Tell me again why we did this costly deed.  There are a lot of countries around the world that have nasty leaders.  Why did Iraq draw the short straw?

Sometime around the beginning of the Iraq war, we took down our flags.  We took them down because bush had morphed the stars and stripes.  It was no longer a symbol of a united nation.  Now it represented a warring nation.   Many of us disagreed with bush and his perpetual war.  According to the bush administration, we are in a forever war against terror.  We will remain in a state of war until every terrorist in the world has been dispatched.  How can this war ever end?  It won't.  No matter what any nation does, it will never rid the world of all the dangerous people.  War is not the answer.  For the bush administration, war is the excuse.

With the onset of the invasion of Iraq, our flag was taken away from it's mission of reminding us that we were one, and it became a representation of a threat to just about every nation on the earth.  It no longer stood for peace.  It stood for war and death.  That's not what we thought it to represent.  Bush kidnapped it and flew it over blood and bombs.  During that time, the flag became soiled with lies and more lies.  Its mission was to drape sadly over the coffins of our soldiers.  This was such a sad mission that bush forbade us from seeing it.  Our soldiers deserve more respect than bush has ever given them.  He told them to die for the flag, and when they did, he wouldn't even let us see them with it.

May our dead soldiers rest in peace and may there be no more to join them.  I believe that Lady Liberty mourns each death.  We all do.

Well, it's time to rescue our flag.  It's time to remove the scars of war from the stars and stripes.  Let's clean it up.  Let's do that for the soldiers we have lost in this war.  The most honorable deed we can do for our soldiers is to save their flag.  They died in a war that was founded on lies.  Let's retake our flag and fly it again.  Let it be a constant reminder that we must never ever allow another President to make our country into a country of hate and fear.  That's not who we are and we absolutely refuse to let anyone change us.  It's time to free our flag to fly over a nation of peace.  That's where it belongs.  This is our mission, to retake our flag.  Who better to head the mission than a decorated Viet Nam hero?  Sen. Kerry, please help us!  We want our flag to once again represent a country of hope and peace.  It must no longer be a symbol of war for this country.  Senator Kerry, we have a mission for you.  Are you in?