ArcaMax

What’s your advice?

– Torn

Dear Torn: You don’t provide any details about this flag – nor do you say what your personal politics are – and so I am determined to envision this issue from a wide spectrum.

(I’m proceeding on an assumption that this flag doesn’t contain words or a symbol that might incite violence, but that it represents ideas or values in direct opposition to your own.)

You also don’t seem to have ever asked your neighbor if he could move the flag to another location in his yard, so it wasn’t flapping so distractingly close to your own.

We live in a country where everyone is free to let their freak flag fly, and where people like you and your neighbor can live cordially and peacefully side-by-side – each free to express themselves, or to stay quiet, if that is what you prefer to do.

Your options are to fly a flag or banner of your own, to express your own views directly or indirectly through a multitude of media, or to exercise your own freedom to keep your own thoughts to yourself.

I can’t tell you how to feel, but you might feel differently if you were able to re-frame this. “Tolerance” is a challenge to tolerate others’ freedom of expression, even if you find their actual views abhorrent.

And so when friends ask you what you think of your neighbor’s flag, you can say, “Well, every day when I see it, I’m forced to appreciate the First Amendment. So – God bless America!”

Dear Amy: Recently there was an infidelity issue (on my part) between my husband and me.

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