FLAGGING SPIRIT
My daughter came home today worrying about a giant American flag draped over the stone entrance to our driveway, held in place by two bricks. Who would put it there? she wondered worriedly. I was off to remove it, folding it neatly and placing it atop the stone for whoever did put it there to retrieve. I walked back to the house, wondering, having a dialogue with myself.
I love this country and its flag. But I was worried too. For far too long the flag has been waved not out of joy and gratitude but as an admonition---to get on board or leave. I worry that we have paid too much attention to symbols and anthems and not enough to people and whether this nation is doing as good a job as it could for caring about them. All of them. America is an ideal, of freedom for all and shared purpose and prosperity. It can be guided by its Constitution, inspired by its Anthem and united by its Flag but its people, all its people, are paramount.
I was thirteen when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in a human rights protest on the podium at the ’68 Mexico City Olympics. It was a time of oppression of African Americans in America and throughout the world, apartheid in South Africa and record daily death totals in Southeast Asia. Smith and Carlos had trained their whole lives for that medal moment of gold and bronze but they felt the need to speak powerfully without words about human rights and the need for change.
America was born out of dissent and protest.
In 2003 the drumbeat for the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction and regime change was deafening. The Senate vote for approval was 77, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, to 23. When the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks told a London crowd she was ashamed President George W. Bush was also from Texas, blacklisting and death threats ensued. When France declined to support the Iraq invasion, Bush labeled the French position as anti-American, resulting in anti-French sentiment sweeping our nation and the absurd menu revision in many restaurants of French fries to Freedom fries.
In 2016 Colin Kaepernick first sat and later knelt during pre-game singing of the Star Spangled Banner, stating that “America oppresses black people and people of color”. Although then President Barack Obama called it his constitutional right, President Donald J. Trump later stated “you have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn't be playing, you shouldn't be there, maybe you shouldn't be in the country.” The outrage at the kneeling prevented people from focusing on the point Kaepernick was trying to make about racism and brutality, about human rights, about kindness.
I’ve been around long enough to witness how many flag-wavers are ignorant of what makes a nation strong, just and lasting and how many Bible-thumpers are spiritually void. They routinely conflate nation and religion in any event and use the flag and the Bible as weapons and not inspirations.
Not too long ago we moved to a somewhat rural New Jersey community. Beautiful amber waves of grain are everywhere but I’ve noticed many more Trump 2020 and Trump 2024 pennants than I am used to. And I can’t pick up the news, local or national, without reading about someone threatening someone, often in the name of patriotism of the malevolent and not benevolent sort. That’s where my paranoia came in. I imagined the flag was placed there by one of them, whoever they are, eager to see who would keep it in place and who would remove it. In my overly vivid imagination, they were making a list and checking it twice, the kind of list Joseph McCarthy, not Santa, would keep.
I came home to learn my usually shy and not demonstrative wife had put up the flag, to celebrate the Fourth of July.
Why not? she wondered.
Why not indeed? I thought as I unfolded the flag, kissed it gently and draped it proudly back across the entrance stone.