To the Editor:
Mayor Mike McGinn’s decision to recognize the Vietnamese Heritage and Freedom Flag is an act of signal divisiveness masquerading as a public relations overture to a deeply divided and culturally estranged community. And for reasons I cannot ascertain from your editorial about this decision [in the Oct. 9–15 issue] … you chose to misrepresent this fact to the point of lying.
Nobody who refuses to recognize this flag ever condemns those who choose to embrace it or the right to display it. … But when you state, “It no longer feels like its use is in protest of something,” you are being flagrantly disingenuous, because in the same speech, not three paragraphs earlier, you describe pickets, large ones, at your newspaper for recoiling from what you felt was an atmosphere of suppression.
Let go of the past, you say, let go of the millions dead, the bombs camouflaged as baby toys, the wholesale strafing of women in the little boats of the Mekong Delta. Never. Those who forget the past will find a reminder when they let go of the future.
The desire to live in peace in the United States, recognizing differences in a multicultural environment sometimes boils down to the fact that if you don’t want to serve me tea, you don’t have to. But don’t serve me poison.
As a taxpayer and citizen of the United States, I am perfectly free to wear a peace sign or a whole earth flag, but I am not in a position to demand recognition of Woodstock Nation as the supreme command of our government, nor would I be likely to win an election on such platform. …
— Mac Crary, Seattle