No one, absolutely no one, is telling you that you’re not allowed to stand during the anthem, or pledge during flag displays, or use that time to remember and honor the deceased or living servicemen and women in your life.
Detractors are the ones who are telling others that they’re not permitted to do anything but. They claim that this is out of "respect" for the troops, and their sacrifice—but is it?
We respect the troops and their sacrifices by not sending them to die in fruitless, imperialist wars for which there is no true purpose. We honor the troops, and remember their sacrifices by bringing them home and out of harm’s way.
Those who pretend as if standing up in front of a piece of cloth helps or supports the troops in any way are deluding themselves. At best, it's right-wing virtue signaling. At worst, its an extension of modern "feel-goodism" wherein people look to perform the easiest, most effortless acts to enshrine their "support."
Still, people will say "the flag is more than that! It’s a symbol for our ideals: freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness…"
If anything, it stands as a symbol of bureaucratic tyranny which denies each of us our liberty and the pursuit of happiness since the Constitution's inception. The flag is literally and figuratively the universal symbol for the United States federal government, chosen by the State for that explicit purpose. The flag does not represent its people any more than the State represents its people.
Still, they will tell you "our government is not the flag! Right now it’s pretty corrupt, but that’s no reason to disrespect the flag."
Yet this corruption is inherent to the federal system, and has been a part of its nature since the Revolutionary War. Never in our history has the government represented people; it has always been beholden to a powerful class of elites and not “the people” or their ideals. If these words were ever true, then the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays Rebellion would not have been crushed. The Constitution and the United States would not exist as it does today.
Still, they will say "The moment you start associating our Government with our Flag is the moment you forget what the government’s purpose is in this country and who they answer to."
When we break the symbolism of our flag down to its components, we see that each stripe symbolizes America’s colonialist roots, and each star represents territories whose indigenous populations were occupied by our military until they faced genocide or were annexed.
So many activities and abuses are more disrespectful to the American flag than kneeling:
- Secret FISA courts
- The government’s support of ISIS in Syria
- Laws infringing on the Second Amendment
- Targeting your political opposition with the IRS
- Prosecuting people who expose government crimes as traitors
- Sending America’s youth to fight in preemptive and unconstitutional wars of aggression that never end
- Free speech zones
- Career politicians
- An ever-growing central government
- Killing family pets during no-knock raids at the wrong address
- Shooting unarmed people who are experiencing a mental health crisis
- Bailing out bankers
- Taking money from poor people in America and using it to prop up rich dictators while calling it “foreign aid”
- Mandating that people must purchase a product they don’t want or face penalties
Even beyond these obvious corruptions of our nation's allegedly-virtuous history, we cannot ignore the context in which these jingoistic displays of patriotism occur. Between 2012 and 2015, the Department of Defense invested $53 million of taxpayers' money into professional sports for military tributes—in other words, propaganda.