I burnt an American flag last Wednesday. It wasn’t something I thought I would ever experience, but I guess it’s one of those stages in life, a lot like puberty, that just has to come along at some point.

Actually, in all honesty, I believe I am probably part of a very small minority of American citizens who have taken part in the torching of Old Glory. You would never know that flag burnings were so rare, though, by reading the newspaper. It seems like every dead-brained loser this side of an out-of-work novelist has got an opinion on setting fire to the flag.

It’s one of those intensely emotional issues like abortion and the death penalty that you just don’t want to hear people talk about at all. If Christ himself came down to give his opinion on the death penalty, I’d still give him a big wide yawn and stare out the window at cars driving by.

Because it has been discussed so often, the issue of flag burning has become so mundane that all arguments on either side are packaged up so nice and neat that you could train a retarded one-armed chimp to debate about the whole deal.

Over on the left, there are dudes crying about the First Amendment and off to the right there are dudes, often wearing suits or bearing confederate flags in the back of their pick-up trucks, telling anyone who will listen how veterans fought hard for that darn flag.

Oh, my mistake, I thought they were fighting Nazis and Communism and little known Middle-East dictators. Perhaps I should re-read my history book.

Anyway, my point is not to take a stance on the tired, boring issue.

My point is I’ve actually done the thing now. It wasn’t to protest anything, that seems a little too Don Smith for my own personal tastes. It was just to stage a photograph for the Daily.

And although I sprayed lighter fluid all over the stars and stripes and dropped a match down on the cheap-ass Wal-Mart plastic flag only in the interest of journalism, it didn’t cheapen the experience one bit.

I referred to it as a stage of growing up earlier, but I really think everyone should have to burn an American flag at some point in their formative mid-teens to mid-twenties. Maybe high-schoolers should have to do it after their graduation ceremonies.

In my short life, I don’t remember any other experience giving me such a weird patriotic tingle. I’m no Peter Parker, but I think it felt a lot like my spider-sense was going crazy.

My eyes were not happy with what my brain had directed the rest of my body to do. I was sensing the pure foulness of the act, but I was extremely determined to watch the terrible sight right under my nose with a casual indifference like a good, little liberal.

Despite my feelings about the subject, I can’t say I really promote burning the American flag any more. I wouldn’t want to stop anyone else from doing it, but I’m not making any plans for any further burnings.

Truth is, when I saw that flag burning, I really did feel like a pretty crappy American. I kept telling myself that it was just for the photo, but I still felt like I should be holding a sign or making love in a forest.

Not that I’m against making love in the forest, it’s just that I like America a lot. To me, burning the flag seemed to somehow be an act of aggression against the whole foundation of my country.

It always sounded like a big mouthful of hot air when I heard conservatives refer to the flag as some great symbol of our country and talk about the meaning behind it like it’s the Rosetta Stone or something.

But I must admit that the flag does hold a special place in my heart right next to a bunch of other mushy sensitive stuff that I don’t want to go into because it makes me feel like a complete and utter fool.

The flag does stand for something, that’s the whole point of it. It stands for everything America’s supposed to be about: Liberty, happiness, porn, screwing up and succeeding anyway.

Just because there’s a lot happening in America that I don’t approve of doesn’t mean that I can write it off as a lost cause.

It’s hard to believe that much emotion can be wrapped up in something that you can slap on a thong bikini and sell as “patriotic panties,” but I can’t escape how I really felt when I saw the flag go up in flames.

So try it for yourself. Go ahead, go down to Wal-Mart (and relish in the irony), buy a flag, and torch it like you’re off to oust Frankenstein.

See how truly dirty it feels. Come to terms with the power the flag really does carry. Then write your senator and beg him to vote against the pending amendment. There’s a lot of high-schoolers graduating next year that have some serious flag-burning to do.

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David Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communications from Aurora. He is head news editor of the Daily and a real patriotic effenheimer.