When veterans get patriotism all wrong

The military veterans were angry, and made their feelings known at a recent school board meeting in Flagler County.

Speaking for a larger group, veteran Ted St. Pierre told board members that while attending a recent home show at a local high school, he was shocked to see drawings outside a teacher's room that showed the Statue of Liberty dressed, as he described it, as a hooker, or leashed, or with a ball and chain painted with the words "national debt."

St. Pierre used words like "desecration" and asked the board: "What are these teachers teaching?" He suggested that people who don't like America should go elsewhere. He wanted "clarification" about the kind of coursework that led to such artwork. And he expressed no appreciation for students capable of looking at their country critically.

The drawings at the high school were nowhere near daring. They were the sort of clever spoofs about Lady Liberty you might see from a beginning cartoonist.

What's important is, the artwork had something to say. And what's disturbing is that veterans, of all people, would suggest that student art, thought and speech should be suppressed or disallowed.

Instead of being pilloried, the teacher who led the exercise on literary personification should be commended for encouraging her students to test the boundaries of their assumptions.

St. Pierre's stars-and-stripe shirt notwithstanding, the meeting felt more like a mullahs' meeting in Tehran or something worse out of Damascus, especially when other veterans echoed his alarm and the board sat silent, not once defending its faculty, its students or academic freedom.

Veterans sometimes speak as if their status gives them a greater claim on the flag. It doesn't. Being a veteran is honorable. But being a veteran is not an inherent virtue any more than being a Christian or an American or a Floridian is an inherent virtue.

Being a veteran is no more or less honorable than being a teacher, a firefighter, a physician, an artist, a CEO, a bus driver, a student, or whatever else keeps communities strong.

It's meaningless to speak of defending one's country if that becomes an end in itself, rather than a means of protecting our freedoms, including our freedom of speech and expression.

Here's a thought, concerned veterans: make another visit to the school. Listen to what the young students and their teacher have to say. For in exercising our freedoms, they, too, are our heroes.