The US flag is usually just a piece of cloth. I would not risk my life or serious injury to rescue a flag in peril of fire or of sinking with a ship. I consider a cat more precious. Indeed I would remove an irreplaceable work of art from peril of a fire before I removed a US flag.
If I had to use a flag to make a tourniquet or let someone die, or make a temporary sling for someone with a broken bone so that that person could avoid a more serious injury, then I would debase the flag for such a purpose. There are flags that I would burn in protest -- a Nazi flag, a Soviet flag, the flag of racist South Africa, the flag of the Infernal State, a Confederate flag -- but that is in contrast to the usual respect that I have for Old Glory. I can just imagine what forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes meant to the nearly-dead at Dachau and Mauthausen. Very new management, obviously.
If I had to use a flag to make a tourniquet or let someone die, or make a temporary sling for someone with a broken bone so that that person could avoid a more serious injury, then I would debase the flag for such a purpose. There are flags that I would burn in protest -- a Nazi flag, a Soviet flag, the flag of racist South Africa, the flag of the Infernal State, a Confederate flag -- but that is in contrast to the usual respect that I have for Old Glory. I can just imagine what forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes meant to the nearly-dead at Dachau and Mauthausen. Very new management, obviously.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.