I agree with you completely, Medic.
It's a lousy way to treat anybody, let alone an elderly war veteran. There are any number of other, more sensitive ways this could have been handled that would have satisfied both parties, but that's not the way HOA's conduct their business, at least from what I've heard from friends and family who've chosen to live in them. You do something wrong, you get a letter. You don't make the appropriate changes, you get fined. You still don't make the changes, you get sued and kicked out.
HOA's have always seemed like suburban mini-mobs to me. You pay them for protection, and everything's fine as long as you follow the rules, but as soon as you step out of line there's hell to pay. The main difference is that joining an HOA is completely voluntary.
He needs to follow the rules and decisions of the HOA that he agreed to follow when he purchased his house, take down the offending flag pole, and hang his flag from his front porch so his house will blend into the homogenized neighborhood that he apparently liked so much he decided to buy a house there.
I just absolutely cannot see the problem here. If he built a fence that was too tall, or planted a tree in an unapproved spot, or left his rust-bucket of a car parked on the street they'd tell him to move it, and nobody else would give a rat's ass, but God forbid they should tell him he can't plant a flag pole anywhere he wants to, even though he agreed to live by the decisions of the HOA.
I whole-heartedly agree that in many, many situations a 90 year old veteran should be shown a certain amount of special consideration, but HOA's don't work that way, and in order to maintain the sanctity of the neighborhoods that they "protect", they can't work that way, and that is one of the major flaws to their whole existence.
