'Learn the Rules' 

Editor:

There should be no doubt in any mind or heart, but that the Earth is all there is for us no matter how far we learn to see or travel ('A Symbolic Gesture," March 30). Our political demarcations shift and change, our cultures merge and flow, our footprints and waste can consume anything in its path. There is no away to which our chaos can be tossed; there is only the Earth, and our care of it is primal.

Political flags give a specific message, a necessary message perhaps or perhaps not, depending on your point of view. We have rules governing these flags and consenting to those rules or changing them is key to our form of self-governance. Learn the rules, abide by them or get them changed. If you don't have the time, energy or skills to achieve orderly change, then go poke somebody in the eye and see who squawks. The proposition seemed to me little more than a poke in the eye. But whose eye? Ours?

Making a new hierarchy of flag messages and then arguing about it is a vitriolic distraction from the vital issues we need to discuss and resolve. No need to list those, is there? This is a very male methodology of argumentation: the whole step up/step down paradigm, which inevitably manages to step on good will and civil discourse.

Did it cross any minds that some group of reasonable caring citizens might develop an Earth flag plan, present it to the council and the community and we could discuss its merits? Instead of bickering, we might erect another flagpole, even taller than the one the veterans put up, and on this taller pole see the Earth flag fly alone. Message delivered.

P. Givins, Arcata