Flag desecration at Brown University on Veterans’ Day

The Washington Post reports that some students at Brown University thought they could show how grown up and inclusive they are by tearing up a display of small American flags;

Nicholas Strada, a neuroscience major who’s in an eight-year undergraduate and medical school program at Brown, was in a constitutional law class Thursday when he saw people putting up flags for the ceremony, all along the walkways that crisscross the school’s main green.

When he left class, the first flag he saw was snapped in half, just dangling, he said. So he went and bought a roll of tape. While he was fixing it, he noticed a pile of flags lying on the ground, and then another. So he started putting those flags back into the ground, he said.

Then he saw someone grabbing flags out of the ground and throwing them against a tree. He put those back. Then he saw the same person taking a pile of them and walking off with them. “That wasn’t the only person,” he said. “Someone was walking down the path and stomping on them one by one. I went over and nicely asked, ‘Could you not do that? People just put them up.’ .?.?. I explained they were for Veterans Day. She said, ‘I don’t care about that right now’ and walked off.”

Immature college students who don’t respect other people’s opinions is nothing new, but the fact that there are a number of folks who were willing to restore the display is fairly new. For the University’s part, they aren’t caving to the voices of a few vandals;

Cass Cliatt, a spokesman for the university, responded to questions with an email:

We are investigating the accounts of vandalism to American flags set out on Brown’s College Green to celebrate Veterans Day. Every year members of our campus community come together to honor our veterans and their commitment to serving our country. The flags were planted a day in advance as part of an event held on Veterans Day, where student veterans and ROTC undergraduates joined students, faculty and staff from across campus for a Veterans Day procession and ceremony. According to some accounts we have received, members of our community diligently worked to restore the removed flags, some of which had been removed and left nearby. Other flags were removed by the organizers of the event and replaced the morning of the Veterans Day ceremony. We do not condone the activities that led to the flags being removed, and destruction of property is subject to disciplinary review.

From WJAR;

Strada tried to gather the flags and reassemble them only to see some of the them trashed again.

“A few different people (were) doing things like stomping on them,” he said.

Another Brown student, Tristan Hood, shared similar sentiments.

“(They were) tearing up the flags, stomping them, breaking them in half, (and) throwing them in the trash,” said Hood, who is also an Air Force veteran who did two tours in Iraq.

Meanwhile Newsweek reports that teachers and students at Brown and several other “Ivy League” institutes are calling for the University to be a “Trump sanctuary campus”;

Students, faculty and alumni from top schools, including Brown, Harvard, Yale and Columbia, are calling on school leaders to make each of their campuses a “sanctuary” for people who could face deportation under the policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Community members at the Ivy League schools are among those at colleges and universities across the country taking action following Trump’s election.

“We have reason to believe that Providence Police officers cannot enter the campus without permission of the University,” says a Brown University faculty letter, which employees at the Providence, Rhode Island, school sent to administration officials on Friday; it was published online in the student newspaper Monday. “Given that many students, staff members and their families are directly affected by this issue, we urge the University to immediately work to develop a protocol for the University serving as a sanctuary campus.” The letter includes 168 faculty member names.

Can you imagine the reaction if we had demanded sanctuary from Obama eight years ago?

Category: Dumbass Bullshit