Jesus h christ. Dead Prez is allowed to have their views and to express them by burning the flag... you don't have to listen if you don't want to. Plus I think they're actually right -- sure, America is probably better than most (maybe even all) the other countries, but there's a lot of fucked up shit in this country. DP is burning the flag of the same nation that wrote a clause INTO THE FUCKING CONSTITUTION which protected slavery as a fundamental part of the country. The same nation that fought a Civil War to end slavery because half the country thought it was something worth fighting a war to keep. The same nation that had maybe five minutes of actual freedom for black people during reconstruction, after which segregation and bullshit jim crow laws set in to institute pseudo-slavery... And all that's just the shit the US has done against black people. We also imprisoned third and fourth generation Japanese-Americans in fucking concentration camps in wwii just because they were japanese. We also raped and murdered hundred of thousands (millions?) of native americans for our own imperialist greed. Even today we have weak-ass laws about sweatshop labor -- we let companies like nike and fucking kathie lee gifford use slave labor in asia, and we let other companies use almost-slave labor on the fucking lower east side of NYC, employing little underage girls to sew shoes and shirts for a few cents a day if that much. Why? Because it's good for the aristocrats who control the economy. Same reason we bombed the fuck out of poor innocent women and children at Hiroshima or Hanoi -- to save face and make rich white governmental aristocrats feel like big boys. I'm not on some revolution now tip, I don't hate our government, I don't think the way to change is in violence (not yet at least)... but clearly the US flag represents a lot of horrible, depraved, sick shit in addition to all the noble and good stuff that's been done in its name. The USA is a mixed bag; so yeah, I guess I'm patriotic because I am proud to live in the country that established democracy for the first modern time, the nation that defeated Nazi germany, and so on... but I also absolutely fucking hate the USA for all the elitist racist etc. shit they've done. I think Dead Prez was reacting to that second part when they burned the flag; I hope they wouldn't say they hate everything the US has done, since obviously the US has done some good stuff... but DP was expressing, I think, a sense of distance and distaste and disapproval towards the dirty side of the nation the flag represents.

And like someone said, you don't have to agree with DP, but don't come in on some ignorant the US is the best nation in the world shit -- because it's probably the best country, but in a lot of ways it's also the worst.

peace

emcee squared


"red wine and sleeping pills help me get back to your arms...it's not like the movies" -- radiohead