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Kevin Cullen

Hey, here’s a crazy idea: Students, veterans need to talk

Gamalier Rosa (left) and Brianna MacKinnon, both Army veterans, are members of VFW Post 754 in Amherst. They want to talk with students about respect for the flag.Kevin Cullen/Globe Staff/Boston Globe

AMHERST — Jonathan Lash, the president of Hampshire College, had just pulled into his garage the other night when he saw a car pull up the driveway behind him and two men get out.

Given the tense climate, Lash was initially relieved to realize it was just a couple of guys from Fox News, armed with nothing more than a microphone, a camera, and a dubious grasp of journalistic ethics.

The two men walked uninvited into the garage to launch an ambush interview. Lash wouldn’t talk to them and was heading into his house, when the Fox guy stuck his foot in the door, preventing Lash from closing it.

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“Don’t you realize the whole country’s laughing at you?” the Fox guy asked.

Lash didn’t take the bait, but the TV guys had what they needed and headed off.

Karl Marx, who would have been a very popular guy on the Hampshire College campus, liked to say history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, but in this case Marx had it backwards.

The flap over Lash’s decision to remove the US flag from the center of the famously ultraliberal liberal arts school ostensibly ended on Friday, a couple of days after the farcical confrontation in his garage, before there could be a tragedy greater than hurt feelings.

And I don’t mean to minimize the hurt feelings, especially those of veterans who were deeply offended by the decision not to fly the flag on campus, after it had been lowered to half-staff following Donald Trump’s election, then burned by some moron the night before Veterans Day.

The Constitution protects flag burning as an act of free speech, and hundreds of thousands of armed service members have given their lives to protect that Constitution. But what was done to the flag at Hampshire College — lowered, burned, then banished — seemed more petulant than principled, more indulgent than indignant.

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Just as the backlash directed at students — hateful comments and threats sent via social media and left as voicemails, spewed by people who call themselves patriots — was more pernicious than principled.

Lash told me one of the main reasons the flag went back up was because “we were deluged with all kinds of threatening calls and angry e-mails that were just making it hard for the institution to function.”

The veterans who frequent the Earl J. Sanders Post 754 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars here, just 4 miles from campus, were justifiably upset by the removal of the flag. But they have no tolerance for those who verbally attacked and threatened anyone from the college.

Lash said he removed the flag to facilitate a campus-wide conversation about intolerance and misogyny, about the hatred of immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people of color.

But if anyone from Hampshire College wanted to show support for those from such marginalized communities, all they had to do was head down to Post 754. If they did, they would have learned it’s possible to talk about intolerance without being intolerant of those who respect the flag.

The commander of Post 754 is Victor Nunez Ortiz, who came to the United States as a 7-year-old when his family fled civil war in El Salvador. Ortiz enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq. He led the protest at the college entrance last Sunday, insisting that the flag go back up and that demonstrators be peaceful and respectful.

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The second-in-command at the post is Gamalier Rosa, who was born in Puerto Rico and did a tour in Iraq with the US Army. Gam Rosa has no time for racists or bullies.

One of the more active members of the post is Brianna MacKinnon, an Army veteran who is in the process of transitioning from male to female. She’s getting her treatment at the VA in Northampton. She’d be glad to talk to students, “as long as they respect the flag.”

Respect is on tap at Post 754, in its old-school, subterranean, wood-paneled bar.

“Our post is one of the most inclusive posts in the United States,” Ortiz told me. “Everybody’s welcome, as long as they’re respectful.”

The post sells cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon for a buck. The denizens are friendly. And smoking’s allowed. You’d think the college kids would be beating the doors down.

Ortiz, Rosa, and MacKinnon suspect the most vociferous critics of the flag at Hampshire College know little about the US military, that it has often been ahead of the country as a whole on social progress. It’s a lack of awareness not just at Hampshire College, but in the whole Pioneer Valley, a.k.a. Happy Valley, where the counterculture is the mainstream.

Rosa said veterans have hidden their veteran status when seeking jobs and housing in and around Amherst.

“I think it’s a matter of education,” he said. “It’s cultural.”

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Eduardo Samaniego agrees, and he believes Hampshire College students could educate vets, too. Of the college’s 1,300 students, Samaniego is the rarity who wears a US flag lapel pin, a gift from a friend serving in the Army. He has four American flags in his dorm room.

Sitting in the sleek, sustainable R.W. Kern Center building, the college’s model as it seeks to become “carbon-neutral” by 2020, Samaniego said he is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who arrived in the United States when he was 16. Now 24, he’s in his second year at Hampshire, which gave him a full scholarship.

“I saw the flag as a beacon of hope; that’s what it means to me,” Samaniego said. “But it’s also the flag that was flying when genocide was committed against Native Americans, that flew over slavery, so I respect the position of people who have a problem with the flag. The flag means different things to different people. We need conversations, not a shouting match.”

With the flag back up on campus, there is an opportunity for those conversations to take place, without the shouting. After the banner was raised Friday morning, Ortiz met with Lash. Both men told me they are committed to having students and veterans meet both on campus and at the VFW post, which sits literally on the other side of the tracks that cut through Amherst.

A second demonstration planned by veterans for Sunday afternoon is now billed as a celebration. Ortiz invited Lash and students to join them at the college’s entrance.

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As appalled as he was by the threats that came from outsiders, Lash is impressed by the local vets, “people whose views were very genuine.”

“I certainly can see a dialogue that takes place on our campus and at their post,” Lash said. “We need to cool off first.”

Ortiz is headed off to North Dakota next week. He will join hundreds of other veterans heading west to show solidarity with the Native Americans who oppose an oil pipeline project near Standing Rock reservation.

Some Hampshire students are already there, and he would be glad to have others join him.

“We could have a good conversation,” Victor Nunez Ortiz said. “Lots of time to talk.”


Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.

Correction: A quote graphic in this story previously misstated the title of Jonathan Lash. He is the Hampshire College president.