the difficulty in assessing the legitimacy of taking an action that pits protester against revered national symbol, is that few individuals on either side seem to have a clear understanding of what exactly the end point of the action is meant to be. 

When you protest against a state of affairs in a nation that has no easy answers, and do so through refusing to honour the symbolism within which the transgressions rest, but in which the best of the nation is also entrenched and for which so many died, you place yourself in the unpleasant position of having to argue that you are honouring the dead by refusing to pay homage to their direct sacrifice, while instead, honouring what they died for by acting upon the freedoms their sacrifices ensured. 

you can get away with that for a while, and even be supported for a while in doing so, but after a while it starts to look like narcissism...because the dead don't ask for much.