How did we get into this mess?

The mess I'm talking about is using freedom to destroy freedom.

By one vote the U.S. Senate recently squelched a huge push to seriously undermine the Bill of Rights. In the process they upheld the right to burn the flag if that is the only avenue left to get the government's attention on a given grievance.

Nobody has burned a flag that I know of in over 30 years, and when it was done, it was in opposition to a war. It was negative expression, but it got people's attention, so it's not one of those everyday options for protest, but we may need it again. It's good to know it's still there.

What surprised me most was the number of veterans who came out in support of the amendment. Their comrades who died in wars didn't die for the flag; they died for what the flag means. None of them can speak now, but if they could, I'd wager they would think the whole hoop-la was pretty silly.

They would wonder, too, why their surviving comrades weren't doing more about the real problems facing veterans -- the lack of funding to take care of their physical and mental wounds from war.

Thousands of veterans from Desert Storm and Vietnam, a few from Korea and World War II, are watching the coverage of the current war on television, and it's re-opening wounds. But officers in veterans' groups are up in Washington trading votes for flag amendments. Makes you want to burn a flag to get their attention.

That's not all.

The newest Kids Count survey is out, and we've added nearly a million more American children to the poverty pit. Kentucky is still ranked at 47th among all the states in the way we treat our children, making almost no headway from last year.

Yet, we use freedom of speech to protest any meaningful sex education for teens and we use the freedom to march asking for a law that will take a woman's right to choose whether or not to have more children. At the same time we require her to work without raising the minimum wage to the point she can afford child care, not to mention food and health. She's also lazy and has no values, we use freedom of speech to say.

The protests and marches are an exercise of freedom, and they are effective in many cases. But that's enough. In a democracy, you can't make a law that removes another's choice. Freedom is no longer that when it is taken away from another.

Most politicians should be able to grasp this simple fact, but they play games with it. The game's simple: Vote for limiting freedom if you're sure there aren't enough votes for the limits to pass, then go back home and tell the protesters you tried. It gets votes, sadly enough. It's part of the mess.

That's still not all.

We're “staying the course” on the war on terrorism, but the course isn't well defined by those running the show. So far, we have played into the terrorists strategy, which is to force us to let go of rights and freedoms in the name of fighting the war.

The government is wiretapping us, checking our money trail, wanting to see which books we're reading, censoring the Internet, blocking access to the court system (although the Supreme Court doused this one pretty well last week), and more. Terrorists think we'll get tired of this and abandon democracy for a dictatorship based on fear.

Kill is a word thrown around Washington, D.C. as if they were talking about a lunch menu. The terrorist strategy is to force us to abandon freedoms, to make us like them by fighting them. It's doubtful that burning a flag at this point would wake anybody up.

But it could be said that these kinds of bucket of snakes fights keep us busy, too busy to notice that tax reform pay-offs are going mostly to the wealthy, who are contributing mightily to the current crop of legislators. The only way to get rid of a legislator today is to find a scandal. Votes have been compromised.

And the tax cuts themselves are growing the budget deficit to the point our children and grandchildren will be paying between 20 and 30 times more than we're getting from the current push to “put money back in your pocket.”

Burning a flag or two might shock us into a long-delayed reality check. We're now on the same track as television reality shows, forgetting that the characters are not at all on their own. There are camera crews, sound people, lighting people, grips, directors, sandwiches, bottled water, etc.

The mess we're in is that we can't or won't look at what's behind the camera, at what the flag means and not at the red, white and blue.