Friday, June 14, 2002 | 9:32 a.m.
Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at [email protected] or (702) 259-4082.
What is patriotism?
Depends on who you ask.
The American flag turns 225 today, so its seems a fitting question any person flying a flag might be able to answer.
The flags were easy to find:
Crammed into the sightless window of a bleak apartment building behind Stratosphere Tower.
Slapped across a billboard hawking a country-western radio station near East Charleston Boulevard.
Printed on the neckerchief of the little tan dog an older woman walked along the sidewalks of Summerlin.
Woven in red, white and blue beads into the key chain-size American Indian headdress that dangled from the rearview mirror of a Ford Explorer.
Above "America United" on the rear-window decal of a Toyota pickup.
Flapping in the breeze from the awning of Sabrina's Daybed Factory Outlet on Main Street, where Ruven Gutierrez has been doing business for 30 years. Patriotism, he said, is answering the call.
"Back on 9/11, President Bush said to fly our flags. So we need to display them," Gutierrez said.
He flies three. Originally there were more, but the city got after him for having too many.
"It's everybody sticking together. We're proud to be Americans," Amy Gutierrez, who works in the store, added.
Outside, a city parking marshal proceeded to ticket cars sitting in front of expired meters -- including mine. One guy yelled at him.
"People think they can just ignore these. But it costs you. It makes your property taxes go up," the marshal said.
Maybe patriotism is paying our share.
Mostly though, people looked at me like I was nuts. Maybe it's hard talking to someone who is writing down what you say.
Maybe it would be easier to simply stop asking questions, even easy ones. But that's not patriotism.
On Tuesday President Bush stumped for a Cabinet-level Homeland Security Department. On the same day the U.S. Government Accounting Office released a report that says the homeland security effort is poorly organized and poorly defined.
The "federal government does not yet have commonly accepted and authoritative definitions for key terms, such as 'homeland security,' " the report says.
"In the interim, the potential exists for an uncoordinated approach to homeland security that may lead to duplication of efforts or gaps in coverage, misallocation of resources, and inadequate monitoring of expenditures."
Local, state and federal agencies are operating under their own definitions while others wait for marching orders. So many agencies are involved, the GAO says, that it has "created confusion concerning who was in charge."
The FBI and CIA will not be part of it, even though the GAO report says "no standard protocol exists for sharing intelligence and other sensitive information among federal, state and local officials."
Giving U.S. Cabinet department status to an office that already has received millions of dollars without a clear definition of what it does begs for questions.
What is patriotism? Maybe it's not a question of who we ask.
Maybe it's what we ask, and when.
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