News reports also cast aspersions on Doug Wight’s character by drawing attention to his homeless status. Headlines like “Homeless Man Charged with Flag Burning” planted seeds in readers’ minds that because Doug Wight is homeless his actions are illegitimate. However, no one learns anything by whipping up an irrational mathematical equation that says HOMELESS PERSON EQUALS QUESTIONABLE MORAL CHARACTER.
My dad is homeless, and he is a very respectable, generous, kind-hearted and loving U.S. citizen who pays his taxes and has never, in his entire 73 year-old life, received even a traffic infraction of any kind. You cannot say that about Senator Edward Kennedy or William Jefferson Clinton or Dick Cheney. My dad’s homelessness says nothing about his politics or his moral character. Furthermore, it is nobody’s business that he’s homeless. He does not use food stamps, stay in a shelter or otherwise tax public services. He is, by the way, a Veteran who served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War.
Doug Wight didn’t choose the “homeless” label that the media assigned to his headlines, and he isn’t asking for anyone’s sympathy. Indeed, quite the opposite. Since his pre-trial hearing Doug Wight has been very vocal about his actions and his reasoning.
“Over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children were murdered in the initial ‘shock and awe’ bombing massacre of Baghdad,” he wrote in one of his letters, “and since then anywhere from 550,000 to 1.1 million Iraqi people have been murdered. In addition, 2 million people are internally displaced refugees and another 2.3 million people are external refugees. And that is only Iraq. All Americans have blood on our hands. Our American flag has become an international symbol of shame around the globe. Better to burn them all! I say.”
Doug Wight’s homeless status has nothing to do with whether his flag actions were good choices or poor ones. Drawing attention to Doug Wight’s homeless status is yet another way that people in the United States dehumanize people based along class or racial lines, merely because such people do not own a home, a car, or keep a regular job. The tendency to attach worthlessness to homeless people is symptomatic of the pathologies of American society. It is an indication of mental illness—on the part of those of us who harbor prejudices against other people.
OH SAY CAN'T YOU SEE
In the past few years people across the United States have become increasingly excited about the American flag. Displays have appeared on people’s lawns, in public spaces, dangling from antennas on cars and hanging from trucks. As far as “respect” goes, many people ignore the contradictions in their use and abuse of the U.S. flag.
First there are all those tattered and shredded flags attached to vehicles, many of which blow off and disintegrate in the gutters of the country’s highways. So the “respect the flag” argument is just another form of hypocrisy. What is most offensive however is that a huge percentage of the American flags seen in public today are produced in China.
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