AMERICAN LEGION WILL CONTINUE TO STAND BY FLAG

By the time you read this, the post-mortems on the Senate vote on the flag amendment will largely have subsided. The media may finally have stopped smirking their smirks of supposed intellectual superiority. The constitutional scholars who were thrust into an unaccustomed limelight will have gone back to their universities to continue the debate in quieter fashion. The public-interest groups who took side against us -- and, we always believed, against the public interest -- will have turned their attention to other cherished aspects of traditional American life that need to be modernized, which is to say, cheapened or twisted or gutted altogether.

Observers have suggested that we too should give up the fight. Enough is enough, they say. "You gave it your best, now it's time to pack it in." Those people don't understand what the past six years, since the 1989 Supreme Court decision, have really been about.

From the beginning of our efforts, debate centered on the issue of free speech and whether the proposed amendment infringes on it. But whether flag desecration is free speech, or an abuse of free speech, as Orrin Hatch suggests (and we agree), there is a larger point here that explains why we can't -- shouldn't -- just fold up our tents and go quietly.

Our adversaries have long argued that opposition to the amendment isn't the same as opposition to the flag itself, that is it possible to love the flag and yet vote against protecting it. Perhaps in the best of all possible worlds we could accept such muddled thinking.

Sadly, we don't live in the best of all possible worlds.

In the best of all possible worlds it wouldn't be necessary to install metal detectors in public schools, or have drunk-driving checkpoints on our highways, or give mandatory drug tests to prospective airline employees. Indeed, in the best of all possible worlds, the pope wouldn't have to make his rounds in a bulletproof vehicle. In all of these cases, we have willingly made certain sacrifices in freedom because we recognize that there are bigger interests at stake. In the case of the metal detectors, for example, the safety of our children and our teachers and the establishment of a stable climate for instruction to take place is paramount.

If the flag amendment is about anything, it is about holding the line on respect, on the values that you and I risked our lives to preserve. We live in a society that respects little and honors still less. Most, if not all, of today's ills can be traced to a breakdown in respect -- for laws, for traditions, for people, for the things held sacred by the great bulk of us.

Just as the godless are succeeding at removing God from everyday life, growing numbers of people have come to feel they're not answerable to anything larger than themselves. The message seems to be that nothing takes priority over the needs and desires and rights of the individual. Nothing is forbidden. Everything is permissible, from the shockingly vulgar music that urges kids to go out and shoot cops, to art that depicts Christ plunging into a vat of urine -- to the desecration of a cherished symbol like the U.S. flag.

Are these really the freedoms our forefathers envisioned when they drafted the Bill of Rights? Thomas Jefferson himself didn't regard liberty as a no-strings proposition. His concept of democracy presupposed a nation of honorable citizens. Remove the honorable motives from a free society, and what you have left isn't democracy, but anarchy. What you have left, eventually, is "Lord of the Flies."

Amid all this, the flag stands for something. If respect for the flag were institutionalized, and children were brought up to understand the unique collection of principles it represents, there would be inevitable benefits to society, benefits that would help turn the tide of today's chaos and disrespect. For no one who takes such principles to heart -- no on who sees the flag as an untouchable symbol of democracy, of decency -- could possibly do the things that some people do these days in the name of freedom.

The flag stands for something miraculous that took life upon these shores more than two centuries ago and, if we only let it, will live on for centuries more. It stands for a glorious idea that has survived every challenge, that has persevered in the face of external forces who promised to bury us and internal forces which promised to tear us apart. Let us never forget this.

And let us not forget that 63 out of 99 senators voted with us, or that we won over 375 legislators in total. Our efforts were no more wasted than were the efforts to take remote outposts in the Pacific a half-century ago. Those efforts too failed at first but eventually prevailed.

We undertook a noble fight in trying to save our flag, and the fact that we have suffered a temporary setback doesn't diminish the nobility of what we fought for. This isn't over by a long shot. They will hear from us again.

Daniel A. Ludwig is the national commander of the American Legion, with headquarters in Indianapolis.