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To: Amherst Bulletin
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2003
To Fly or not to Fly
Any person old enough to understand the democratic principle,
understands that
whoever we elect to office represents us. In reality, the
opinions, actions,
and decisions of our municipal, state and national reps. does
not always
reflect our personal principles, interests or desires.
Flags are not elected, but they REPRESENT all the same. Some
of us elected to
leave our fatherland and locate here. Some immigrated 300
years ago, some a
generation or two ago, some by force. Nobody that I know of,
however, even an
astronaut has elected to leave the motherland Earth.
So which flag represents us best?
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note: The following 3 paragraphs may be cut in order to
provide more space
for other writers:
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It would be interesting - and costly to commission a study to
discover the
aboriginal origin of everyone in the municipality and the
number of years
their descendants have lived in this country. Time spent
abroad for
education, national service and recreations should not count.
Another
commission would then be charged with crafting these stats
into a formula
which will determine the exact proportion and number of flags
needed to
accurately represent each national origin in our town.
However, if counties cease to exist and/or more people
immigrate - that would
be awkward. Perhaps a grant from a big software company could
be used to
develop a program that uses census information to update the
data
automatically.
However, would all those individual flags be cost effective?
Can you buy just
one Tibetan, Wampanoag, Latvian, Cambodian, or French flag
wholesale?
Furthermore, if you are dealing in percentages, how are you
going to represent
.5 or .33 or .375?
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There is an economical and fair solution, but it takes some work from people.
It requires that we commit to respect for each other. Here it
is:
Let flags fly in Amherst. The red white and blue of the
fatherland and blue and green of the motherland can fly side by side and/or on
alternate poles along the street.
We are Americans. We can do this.
--
Robin MacRostie
Amherst MA
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