Armed Escort

One of the things I hadn’t noticed in my haste to take the photos – and get back to my place in line – during the Fourth of July parades was that our American flag bearer did not have an “armed” escort.

Carrying an American flag on parade without an escort is a big no-no in flag and parade etiquette. Our current band front advisors literally grew up on the front, guided by a very strict, no-nonsense advisor who has since retired. I knew one day she’d retire so I would listen every chance I got to learn what the band front needed to do. M. knew her flag etiquette backwards and forwards.

“Never let the American flag go down the street without an escort!” she said. If no escort is available, then you don’t send the flag out. That’s all there was to it. So when I looked at the pictures of Monday’s parades, I thought, “Uh-oh! M. won’t like this!”

As I was putting my xylophone away after tonight’s rehearsal, I noticed a spare drill rifle in the closet, which I stowed in the back of my car for future parades, including a parade in Port Jervis this Friday. I am now a proud fake gun owner. I’m “carrying.”

It’s only a prop of course. The escorted defense of the flag in this case is only symbolic. Yet there’s a great probability in our future that we’ll need the real thing to defend ourselves against the encroachments of an overreaching government. Even now, progressives are trying to get the Second Amendment repealed. They’ve made gun ownership regulatively prohibited. Friends who own guns cannot transport their weapons intact; they must disassemble them, place the gun in is case, then reassemble it when they get to a shooting range.

In urban and suburban areas, they cannot use the weapon within a certain number of feet of a dwelling. Gun advocates are correct when they say that the police, at least of today, do not consider it their job to protect the individual – only society. Our judiciary is working on making defense of one’s property illegal as well.

Glenn Beck’s novel, The Overton Window, deals with Second Amendment issues and the forming of militias. He lays the Progressive Plan all out for us, showing us how we’ve been nudged into complacency – forgetting our history, or rather not being taught anything about it to remember, turning our back on principles, fearing to get involved, being satisfied with our lowly lot in life, not wanting to argue, not wanting to rock the boat, accepting our “place” in the Progressive order of things, taking it for granted that there’s nothing we can do about the Progressive scheme for transforming the world.

Beck reveals pernicious truths about the public relations field. How many PR pushers would recognize themselves, if they read his novel? The fact that the Mainstream Media paints Glenn as a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, thus causing many “normal” people (read “spineless”) to avoid him, just proves the point of his novel. Marginalization works.

Thankfully, he leaves the reader at the end with a list of books to peruse, beginning with Bernays’ Propaganda, which inspired the Nazi propaganda machine. These are books Progressives want their own students to read, not their adversaries. Luckily, we have authors like Glenn and Ann Coulter to provide us with a reading list.

Some of us even find interesting books on our own, such as TV and National Security, which Amazon.com thoughtfully scoured their book lists to find for me, knowing my reading proclivities. Sometimes it’s not so bad when a merchant studies your habits. Thanks, Amazon! Keep on studying my reading habits, please!

Meanwhile, we must keep ourselves armed with knowledge, if not bullets. Lady Liberty should always have an armed escort.