20 year military veteran ....
I recognize your right to burn the flag ...
I only ask that you recognize how much it hurts to see you do it.
Why does it hurt? Thanks for being honest.
Why does it hurt?
Because I have seen the price paid to protect the right to burn the flag. I have held the guts of a kid from Illinois while he died for that flag, and for what it represents. I had my best friend take a bullet intended for me, leaving his wife and little boy devastated, all while defending that flag. Do you know what it's like to try to put his brains back in his head? I've laid in a hole in the ground all night as I watched enemy mortars trying to knock that flag down, and watched as it still stood in light of morning. I've participated in color guards at the funerals of military members, and seen widows who cling to that flag with a fierceness you can never understand, as if it were a symbol of the courage and honor of the loved one they lost. I watched a father receive the flag, then collapse on the ground crying incessantly, until finally he was able to stand, kiss the coffin of his child, come to attention and salute his little girl. A little girl he has lost forever.
So, yeah, it hurts to watch them do it.
I recognize the right to burn it --- hell, that's what I fought for. But, I find it ludicrous that those who have never defended that flag, nor defended the rights it represents, to so trivialize its meaning, and the sacrifices for it, to use the symbol of those freedoms and sacrifices to make a political argument. I consider to be a sacrilege and an insult to those who made the sacrifice so that "rights" can be abused, misused, and discarded so easily. We aren't burning a flag, we are demeaning and trivializing the efforts, and lives lost, to make it your right.
So, yeah, it hurts to watch them do it.