Talk:Anti-Americanism/@comment-681745-20130105092606/@comment-3338975-20130105174757

Well, I may not be exactly what you would call a regular contributor, but I have become well-known on various portions of the net for giving generally balanced viewpoints (plus, I am an American), so here it goes.

The flag is supposed to be symbolic of the best virtues of the United States (red for the courageous shedding of blood, blue for love of liberty, and white for the ultimate desire for peace without the oppressive hand of a dictator forcing it, or something along those lines), and so the burning of it is generally a stab at the liberal virtues of the United States. Now, flag-burning is protected by the amendment to the Constitution protecting the freedom of speech, understood by general consensus to extend to freedom of expression so long as it does not become an actual danger to the United States citzenry (only super-conservative reactionaries ultimately say otherwise), but nevertheless it's generally understood as a symbolic demonstration of the denial of said liberal virtues in the face of some other perspective (typically a socialist/Leftist viewpoint) which the government simply must allow because we're supposed to be noble enough not to be threatened by mere symbolic displays.

Now, there certainly may be other pictures which would be considered more incidenary (like a picture of the World Trade Center on 9/11 claiming that only conservatives call this an evil act and anti-American, which hopefully this wiki has better taste than to even contemplate using), but flag-burning is incidenary (coincidentally almost a pun on the word "burning" in this case) enough for it to better for the wiki to choose some other picture which more clearly portrays conservative one-sidedness and is less complicated in terms of the message it sends across. If you wish to ignore this viewpoint because I'm not a regular contributor, very well then; I just noticed no one else had answered you yet, and felt that what I had to say might be of relatively strong value for your decision-making process concerning said picture.

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