Flying with no convictions?

From the Philadelphia Daily News, here's a guy who apparently thinks that a thing is only as moral as its manufacturers:

Ronnie Polaneczky | Jail-made flags should't adorn vets' graves IS IT WRONG that those who have preyed on society are making the flags used to honor those who once protected it?

Matt Conway thinks so. He's a National Guard veteran, and he says, "When I die, I don't want the flag on my grave to be made by a rapist."

The man has a way with words. He also has a point.

As we speak, inmates in Pennsylvania and New Jersey state prisons are producing the American flags that will adorn veterans' graves on Memorial Day.

But this country has lost so much business to foreign countries whose low wages tamp down the price of the goods they peddle, it doesn't seem right for American manufacturers to lose work to our own prison-industry programs whose inmates are paid pennies per hour. Especially when what they're producing is the Stars and Stripes.

The problem I have with this is that a flag is a symbol, and it can be made from cloth or plastic material, by humans, machines, or I suppose even animals. Respect for the flag is fine, but I think it carries hypersensitivity too far to worry about the background of the people who might have made it. It's one thing to want to stop exploitation of workers (including prisoners), but even that does not render immoral the things that the workers made. Here, there isn't really an abuse being complained of; only that some people don't like the idea that a bad person might have made their flag. How do we know that bad people don't work in factories? Should mandatory background checks be done on all people involved in flag manufacture, and the factories prohibited from hiring ex convicts? For that matter, should bad people be allowed to own or fly flags? I mean, would you want a rapist or child molester waving a flag? Sounds scary to me. The flag could end up in the Goodwill or something, where an innocent victim could buy it! (And at what point did manufacturing start? Did the cotton or nylon fibers come from evil places where they might have been handled by evil men?)

I'll bet there are a lot of other things which bad people have touched, and we don't even know it. Why, the very food you eat could have been handled by a rapist!

Surely the government can protect us!

posted by Eric on 03.30.04 at 09:16 AM





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