Hospital worker/firefighter told to remove flag honoring fallen firefighters from his truck on 9/11
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In recent years, the really stupid stuff done on 9/11 has come from a well known corporation or two trying to make a commercial and usually crass connection to the solemn day. If any of that happened yesterday, I missed it.
This self-inflicted public relations problem comes from the opposite direction. Some apparently misguided medical center employees took it upon themselves to prevent a firefighter and fellow employee from honoring the fallen on 9/11.
Peter Salter, Lincoln Journal Star:
Cody Meredith mounted a U.S. flag — black and white, with a single red stripe — on his pickup to send a message of his respect for fallen firefighters.
But when he drove to work Monday, his supervisors at Crete Area Medical Center gave him a message of their own, his wife said: Take the flag off the truck, or take the truck off hospital property.
Before his shift ended, his wife would write about the order on Facebook and contact the newspaper, and the hospital would call it a misunderstanding and a mistake. But Kristin Meredith would continue to call it an outrage, something that shouldn’t disappear simply because the hospital apologized.
“It’s Sept. 11, Patriot Day,” she said. “We take fallen firefighters very seriously.”
Here’s why: She and her husband are both volunteer firefighters. Their fathers were firefighters. Cody Meredith recently lost a friend, a firefighter, to cancer.
