A sidebar to the News & Observer‘s coverage of the Jesse Helms funeral service tells us that a state employee retired yesterday rather than allow flags in his building to be lowered to half-staff.

What concerns me about this story is not L.F. Eason III’s anti-Helms sentiment. It’s a free country. Eason can and should think what he wants.

But Eason failed to take the proper view of his role as a state employee:

Several people, including his wife, argued to Eason that the flags
belonged to the state, as did the lab. But Eason said he felt a strong
sense of ownership.

Eason and a previous boss had sketched out
the building’s rough design on a napkin at the Atlanta airport in 1984
after attending a national conference on weights and measures.

He then worked to get funding for it in the state budget, and he recently helped snag state money to study building another lab.

“I
designed and built that lab,” he said. “Even though technically the
bricks and mortar belong to the state of North Carolina, I feel very
strongly that everything that comes out of there is my responsibility.”

Did Eason pay for the building? Then he doesn’t own it.