OCCOM BILL wrote:edgarblythe wrote: Who is this left that you people talk about,...
My sister, Bro-in-law, Soz, Nimh and many if not most of the people I love and respect most.
I am not American, so I dont have to deal with how "Anti-American doesn't sell well here in the United States" or with the risk of "The Right" exclusively "aligning themselves with a beloved symbol".
It's not such a big deal in Holland. The Dutch flag is well-liked and gladly flown when there's football on the telly, but doesnt evoke the emotional, passionate reverence you express, except perhaps among the elderly and the deeply Protestant. So although of course it's always an unwise move, politically, to actively go out and offend through flag-burning or the like, expressing the kind of agnosticism re flag-waving like I did isn't much of a political risk.
I am therefore free to approach the question in the philosophical way it was asked, without having to instantly worry about political expediency and how it would play out in elections.
In fact, so is Soz and anyone else who comes here. You may notice that the question was asked in the Philosophy & Debate forum, not in the Politics forum. We are therefore free to express our personal, individual feelings about it without having to bother about political strategy. We are free to approach the question as individuals, rather than as representatives of "The Left". And as you will have noticed, it then turns out different people on the Left actually have very different feelings on it.
If McTag
had indeed asked the question: what approach should the Left, or the Democratic Party, or Labour, or whatever, take towards the political use of the flag, I am convinced that all of us would indeed agree that, for a politician, it would be Greatly Unwise to deride the flag, especially in the US. We are not all that gullible on the "point... of strategy" you raise.
But even if we were to be smart enough to turn on this point of strategy if ever recruited for some kind of political campaigning job, we cant very well change our actual personal feelings and instincts on this matter - and
that is what McTag asked us about. We are after all, I think I can assume to say for all, not quite
so politicized that we have succeeded mastering the art of making our personal feelings and instincts subservient to electoral expediency. So we answer accordingly. Should we train ourselves diligently into learning to love the flag, just so we dont let the Democratic Party's chances down as presumed card-carrying members of The Left?
Truth is, there's no "trap" waiting for us here on A2K in any case (face it, nothing any of us will say here will have any consequence of significance in the political realm). When asked a straightforward question about our personal take in the Philosophy Forum, we don't, thank God, have to worry about "alienating a healthy chunk of the folks you need to get elected" - we're not out to "rule the Nation". We won't "forever be shooting our own feet" by fessing up that, personally, this flag-waving thing is a bit of a mystery to us, and just seems off-putting to our sensitivities somehow.
Why don't you approach this thread, or rather, the others in it, as an individual as well, as one would in a Philosophy & Debate forum? The "predisposition" to approach every question within a perspective of Us/Them, Left/Right, Republican/Democrat is tiresome enough on the Politics board, not to mention how it is a mostly irrelevant distraction to the many of us outside America.
) motives behind every other action.
