Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (I get nervous
when my wife goes for an eye exam just in case she reconsiders the last three
plus decades) and while matters of taste are always subject to discussion, we
live in a time of more deeply felt and loudly professed sense of injury from
all manner of devices and deeds, real and/or imagined.
Wandering around on the interweb (I think I originally
intended to check the weather but that was a decade and six hundred kajillion
water-skiing-squirrels-eaten-by-grumpy-cats ago) I saw a picture of (I assumed)
a military service person’s newborn baby (battle dress uniform as the
background because the child was being held at waist height) sleeping peacefully swaddled in a white warming blanket while cradled in an American flag.
Talk about angering people, the photo certainly did that.
I’m a father, a veteran of active duty, an American
and obviously dumber than a box of rocks because I don’t “see” the disrespect
(or worse) by the photographer or the family who desired the image in the first
place that has so inflamed so many people.
And without intending to pour gasoline onto that
particular “you’re disrespecting the flag” fire, might I suggest to all those
whose intentions are as least as pure as their rhetoric perhaps we can worry a
bit more about more fully practicing and realizing the virtues for which our
flag stands and less about appearances.
-bill kenny
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