Firefighter suspended for refusing to remove American flag sticker from his locker
A firefighter in Pennsylvania has been suspended for refusing to remove an American flag sticker from his locker. The fire department implemented a new policy that bans stickers from lockers after some racist stickers were found on some firefighter’s lockers.
The new policy bans all stickers– union, cartoon and political must be removed from lockers. Surely an American flag sticker doesn’t fall into any of those categories so James Krapf left his sticker on his locker, prompting the chief to tell him it had to be removed. James Krapf refused and has been suspended.
Here is what James Krapf had to say:
The chief came out and said ‘You have to remove your stickers,’ I said ‘No disrespect chief, but I’m not taking the flag off
Fire Commissioner James Johnson, a former marine, denies that this had anything to do with the image of the flag:
We wear the American flag on our uniform…it’s flying outside that station,” he said. “It is not about the American flag or patriotism
I believe him, I don’t think that this has anything to do with the fact that the sticker in question is the American flag. But this does highlight a larger problem in our society today– political correctness.
Instead of singling out and punishing the firefighters who actually put racist stickers on their lockers the fire department thought that it would be better served to ban all stickers no matter how innocent and unoffending they may be. The fire department decided that instead of trying to decide what is offensive and what is not offensive they would insulate themselves from making that decision by telling everyone, even those who have done nothing wrong, that they can no longer put anything on their lockers.
It would seem that a better approach would have been to discipline those that put racists stickers on their lockers. The people who put offensive stickers on their lockers incur no punishment while everyone else has to suffer for their misdeeds. This is a perfect example of political correctness. Nobody is held accountable for their own actions and others have to suffer for it.
America's Watchtower 
It does sound like the fire department has taken the easy road, instead of actually addressing the real problem at hand. Like you, I think it would have been better to stop the racist stickers than to stop all of them.
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I fully agree!
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I think it DOES fall under the category of: ALL. While I think the suspension was laughable, I do also believe that if there’s a rule in place, allowing exception causes all kinds of problems.
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While I agree that a company should be able to put in place whatever rules they want to I just think that this rule was taking the easy way out instead of punishing those that should have been.
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This is always the case with political correctness–the whole must be punished for the actions of the few. This goes way back- I recall as a young boy we often all would be punished for what one person did. And often the punishment would stand until the guilty person stepped forward. Today things have gone to the extreme and this fire-fighter incident really points this out.
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And therein lies one of the great many problems with political correctness and socialism in general, the absence of personal accountability. Whatever happened to discipline, self disipline and accountability?
This practice of controlling the actions of all under the guise of protecting us all is just one more way of eroding our sense of the individual. With out personal accountability the is less individuality and therefore less desire for individual liberty.
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Sure looks like the easy way out to me. I’m glad that we never had to address this though. Removing would not have been an option,and I hate painting!
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