Heroic Flags

Get Some, Russ:

We'd be better off if more folks thought like this:

Arriving early for my flight, I found myself grumpily grumbling about the hassle of airline security and as I struggled to get my metal-studded western belt back through those damned harder-to-reach loops and pull my boots back on, the thought blossomed in my brain momentarily, that given the opportunity, I would gladly don the uniform once again and join the mission to seek out and take out some of the terrorist bastards who were causing me this too early-in-the-day aggravation. As I proceeded down the concourse, I indulged myself with the thought of laying the sight blade of an automatic weapon on some Muj and sending his raggedy butt smoking off to Paradise for causing me to be sent through all this airport security: not exactly a balanced trade-off, I know, but hey, they started it.

In response to Steve Schippert's excellent piece on fighting and politics, "Clint" wrote in to say:

While you may believe that the country has changed, the truth is that as the world becomes smaller, our perspective has become more broad. No longer are we restricted to the one-sided, self-preservating view of the world that you seem to admire.

Damn right I admire it. The alternative to the 'self-preservating' view used to be called "suicide."

It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront.

Every man is born to a flag. He ought to defend it, if it is a good flag; or destroy it, if it is a bad one. This business that 'we must understand that our flag isn't better than any other' is nonsense. It is our business to make it better than any other, or to rend it out of the world. That is the heroic life.