It was
reported this weekend by MSNBC that the United States will not display the American flag on its World Cup soccer team's tour bus this summer. The tournament will be held in Germany and it was decided by US and German security officials that the Stars and Stripes being on the busses would be a security risk. It can only be assumed that the easy identification of a bus full of Americans in Europe is a target for terrorism and therefore an attempt to disguise the players by not associating our country with their bus creates a safer environment for them. No flags on the bus means no one knows it's full of Americans which means there is a less likelihood that they will be attacked by someone or something.
Is it just me or should our actions both politically and militarily make us safer rather than put us in a spot in which we can't put the US flag on a bus or Americans might be killed? I mean, isn't this backwards? Before March, 2003 could anyone have imagined that a US soccer team's bus be blown up or shot at by terrorists at the World Cup? Shouldn't our occupation of Iraq and our "fight in the war on terror" that we hear on a daily basis by every Republican in every speech make that trip to Germany a safer one? Shouldn't these NSA wire taps be rounding up all of the terrorists around the world conversing with one another who plot such things? Why do we have to hide our nationalism and our pride in displaying our flag just so we don't get killed at a soccer tournament? The possibility never even crossed my mind until now...
But now I CAN imagine that bus being attacked. I can imagine a whole crowd of people denouncing who we are and what we stand for this summer. I actually can imagine a car bomb attacking a bus full of Americans in Europe or Africa or Asia or anywhere else. I expect to see protestors at our games with signs and whistles (Americans boo, the rest of the world whistles at their nemesis) when we take the field and lose as usual at the World Cup. But the real problem is this is the norm for us now. We had such a wonderful opportunity to get the entire world behind us in attempt to capture and punish those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, after three years of disappointment and international as well as domestic unpopularity regarding the war in Iraq our actions have the rest of the world hating us. We did the ol' "bait and switch" moving from Afghanistan to Iraq and we pay for it with crap like this. We have to hide who we are when we go to Germany for God's sake. What is going on? What are we getting out of this war? If our US soccer team is unsafe there, am I unsafe there? And what is being done to change this?
The fact that our soccer team needs more security than usual while visiting Germany this summer isn't too big a deal, but the principle of it is enormous. It is proof that Americans are less safe than they were 5 years ago - less safe than even 3 years ago. It is proof that the war in Iraq has served no good purpose. I'm sorry, but overthrowing Saddam Hussein isn't good enough, otherwise that's all the White House would have pitched to us in February, 2003 instead of all of that other nonsense get were shoveled. Unfortunately, we are stuck there for now and it continues to put our citizens at risk of being targets for terrorists to attack. What a waste. For all of our money and our soldiers to go fight for some unexplainable ideology while we pay the price with our normalcy.
So, while we sit on our couches eating our McDonald's dinners watching anything other than the World Cup this June (we don't like soccer, anyway), remember the price our players are paying to be there. Think about why the tv screen has the United States losing the game, but the reality off the field has the US losing a much more important, a much scarier battle.
Think about why America now has to choose security in exchange for nationalism.
