I’ve always felt deep-seated pride when looking at the American flag. The concept of America inspires me.
That’s why a wooden American flag hangs above my desk. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at it (see this column on my fear of hanging it), but only recently discovered it has fifteen stripes instead of the customary thirteen. I counted them a dozen times then had Jenny count them too because math isn’t my “thing.”
Nevertheless, I’m keeping it. It’s close enough to get the point, even if not entirely accurate. There also aren’t fifty stars, but I knew that when I bought it.
I am not particularly sensitive when it comes to flags; nobody trained as a lawyer should be. We know that to hate it is to love it, like a teen girl throwing shade at her mom for singing joyfully in the car.
The flag flies for the prosecutor as well as for the accused, the judge and the jury – even those who’ve been recused.
Our actual American flag is in front of our house, right where you first drive up. Many people equate the flag foremost with the military, but to me, that’s just one of its many defining parts.
My flag primarily reminds me of the American dream itself. Though weather-beaten and fading, it is beautiful and symbolic, capable of moving men to tears in the right context. While it may get so wrapped up in itself that its at times unrecognizable, it will always right itself and fly – high and proud – for all the world to see.
I would never cede the symbolism to those who view it differently any more than the Pope would cede the cross’ symbolism to a different denomination.
In fact, the American flag is a lot like the Christian cross, at least in my subsection of society. They’re universally recognized symbols that mean drastically separate things to differently situated people and most academics turn their noses up at both.
My flag flew when Obama was President the same as it does with Trump. It flies on Martin Luther King Jr. day and President’s Day, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. And of course, on Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, and the fourth of July.
It doesn’t discriminate, it just hangs there: flapping in the breeze, freezing in the snow or baking in the sun. It gets pelted by my snowblower and on more than one occasion has frozen to the gutter and stayed like that for weeks since ripping it was my only other option.
Flag Day is one of my favorite days of the year because all of the small towns in my area line the streets with flags. It’s a beautiful site that momentarily seems to bring to life the places John Mellencamp sings about. The sort of worlds that exist inside Frank Capra films and Norman Rockwell paintings.
America at its untarnished ideal.
The country Langston Hughes described, decades before the Civil Rights movement and dishearteningly still true for so many today, as “the land that never has been yet – And yet must be.”
There aren’t many symbols in the world that can mean so many different things to so many varied people.
The beauty of freedom (and of divine creation) is the right to make our own choices within the relatively broad confines of our laws, whether God’s or man’s.
Unifying threads connecting the Wall Street trader to the Peace Corp activist or the frat boy with a shopping cart full of ill-informed Tiki torches to the inner-city widow who only ever leaves home on Sunday mornings for church because her streets aren’t safe.
Flag Day shouldn’t just be a celebration of the symbol itself and its amazing history from Betsy Ross’ lap to the shores of Iwo Jima and being planted on the moon by Superman. It should be a celebration of American ideals – the drive to reach our standard: Puritan settler John Winthrop’s shining city upon a hill wrapped in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.
And it should be celebrated with a communal self-awareness that not everyone sees things the same – that our interpretation, however personal or profound, is no more or less valid than the views of a similarly well-intentioned denomination worshipping from their pews.
Patriotism, like prayer, comes in many varied forms. Some throw their hands in praise and dance in the aisles while others simply bow their heads or show it when they kneel.
We must strive to weave society together, as strands of fabric form a flag, to live up to our calling as the land of the free and the home of the brave – even if in our haste to celebrate we end up with fifteen stripes.
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