Sending the wrong message

Manhattanville senior Toni Smith turns her back to the American flag during the national anthem because she thinks America is bent on expanding its power.\nI disagree with her conclusions about why America may go to war in Iraq, but I can handle a difference of opinion. What disturbs me is the way she is acting.\nMy great-grandmother, Sarah Seldin, was born in Russia in the late 1800s, when life for Russian Jews was uncertain. Playing in the ghetto with a friend one day, a Russian soldier rode up on horseback, pulled out his gun, took aim and shot the other girl in the head. The Seldins soon left Russia for America.\nIn America, Sarah met her husband Ben Zion Eisenstadt who emigrated to the United States in 1903 because the young rabbi also did not want his fate to rest in the passions of a brutal Czar, whose passion was to make life miserable for Jews.\nMy grandmother's grandparents left Russia for America a generation earlier, having found their children hiding guns, preparing to revolt against the Czar.\nOn my mother's side, different families came to America for various reasons, but mainly to leave old worlds with no possibility for advancement.\nBut my stories are not unique. In fact, they are quite representative of this country's genealogy, a family tree of the world's unwanted and adventurous.\nOf course America is not perfect. Americans must never forget the brutality of slavery, which dehumanized so many generations of blacks, or the stifling and suffocating effects of Jim Crow, still in effect in some circles. We should also always keep in mind that this country's expansion came at the price of Native American blood. Even still there are other transgressions.\nBut let no one ever forget that America is the great experiment in the lab of history.\nOur democracy has allowed for protest, discussion, compromise and change.\nThis is what the American flag represents: the constant trial and error of a nation whose hypothesis is that people of all kinds can live together in equality and liberty -- the exception and not the rule of the world.\nThe Constitution is the contract that explains that Americans must forever attempt to prove the hypothesis. So the most tangible symbol of that contract is the flag.\nWhatever Toni Smith's intentions are, turning her back on the flag represents giving up on the contract, which can only ensure the country move in the wrong direction.\nI encourage her to turn around and protest differently.\n-- Michael Eisenstadt