"Spontaneous" Lowering of Flags to Half-Staff

[2nd trick op]

I live in Northeastern Pennsylvania, an area which has seen a heavy rate of participation in the military. During a short trip to a neighboring community some thirty miles away, I noticed several flags at VFW posts and similar locations lowered to half-staff. And another poster from Texas has noticed the same thing.

I'm not going to try to over-simplify this action into some conspiracy. But I'm old enough to recall the flowering of American flag decals during the early stages of the Vietnam polarization of the Sixties, and an outpouring of positive reaction to a pro-American essay by Canadian columnist Gordon Sinclair about ten years later.

To put it as simply as I can, there are a lot of people, not necessarily staunch conservatives (but a lot of whom the elitists who seek to dominate this site would deride as "teabaggers or "conservitards") who are simply fed up with the way passing "causes of the day" have worked their way into functions and protocols of statecraft which were once reserved for only the most serious occasions.

And the incredible faux pas by theWhite House in honoring a controversial Supreme Court decision, while refraining from recognizing five Americans who lost their lives to the actions of a delusional sociopath was simply the galvanizing event.

I'm not going to comment on either of the two events which spawned these actions; I'm only trying to point out that the hijacking of true patriotism for single-issue displays of partisanship may be about to backfire.