What the right wing has destroyed beyond Bowe's character and beyond Obama's sanity is the one place of absolute American unity in love and caring. The single place of agreement for all Americans. The one place where we could all join in a universal commitment. All of this --up in flames and gone forever.
The only other flag Americans have universally rallied around besides the stars and strips is the Vietnam era POW-MIA flag, which is flown universally by all patriots. The disemboweling of Bowe's character by the right-wing sling machine has taken a match to the "black and white"-- America's symbol of compassion and honor.
We have never evaluated the records of our missing soldiers to determine their worth before we took any and all measures to make sure they return home. But its a new day.
Thankfully we continue to see the black and white flags most places you might see the red, white and blue. And at times, what it symbolizes is more true about American compassion and love then other symbol. It is something very rare -- a source of universal agreement among all Americans. A universal commitment to a value that cannot be shaken, that all soldiers who are missing or who are imprisoned will receive every ounce of our hope and every bit of our energy until the day they return from the war zone.
This was the single, universal, unshakeable agreement among every American. Until today.
What the right wing has destroyed beyond Bowe's character and beyond Obama's sanity is the one place of absolute American unity in love and caring. The single place. Up in flames.
We will agree and we will disagree about whether to go to war, to stay in war, to pay for war. But we have never disagreed about this simple, defining rule of our national character on this matter.
Nobody ever told me-- as a kid growing up during the Vietnam war, or as an adult witnessing all the later wars-- that my agreement with every other person I met -- with those I shared a perspective and with those I differed -- was somehow contingent on someone deciding if the missing or the prisoners were worthy of return.
The whole notion of "worth" in wartime is strange. The entire idea that only people with "good records" receive our hopes and dreams for return is so goddamn offensive that you might as well take a match to the black flag.