I was raised in a time and place, and in a family, that followed strict protocol about home-handling of the American flag. Fly it on Memorial Day, on Flag Day, on the 4th of July, Labor Day. Never let it touch the ground. Never fly it in the rain. Take it in at sunset. Fold it properly and when it is tattered by the wind, dispose of it by burning. Reverently. If you call your congressperson, you might be able to get one that was flown over the Capitol; my teenage self wondered if they were rotated hourly to create stock.
This week, I’m thinking about turning my flag upside down.
One of the chief first-irritating, then-troubling, then-enraging actions of the MAGA right in recent years, for me, has been the co-opting of the American flag. This is the flag to which I pledged allegiance as a child. I once was honored to carry it as part of a girl scout ceremony; even now, when a color guard marches by at ceremonies and parades, I place my hand on my heart, and am silent.
Do not mistake me for a blind adherent. I know that terrible things have been done under our flag. And I also know that marvelous things have been done. Terrible. Marvelous. Flag history and effects are as much a quilt of complications as this country itself, a complex system which is always amending itself. Pieces of various sizes and composition, flexing, requiring repair and upkeep, and a backing layer holding it together. Edges expanding. Stitched together originally and continuously by our own human hands.
I suppose that makes it a crazy quilt.
The years have blurred our flag as an unmixed symbol, I suppose, (flag clothing, advertising tropes, endless repetitions at car dealerships, et al.), but use of the Stars and Stripes inside this country as pure set decoration, as a sign of truculence, as something meant to intimidate or exclude, wall-to-wall symbol-shouting, I might argue, has accelerated over the last ten years. Trump train, anyone?
Sometimes now flying the flag seems somehow inappropriate, as if it has come to stand for something different, something else. How can this be?
For months now, I have been standing weekly with a dozen of my neighbors on a heavy-traffic city street corner during rush hour, signaling our dissatisfaction with the present administration and its policies. It is a rather courteous demonstration, as such things go. People carry whatever signs they wish; the most representative is probably “Honk If You Support Democracy”, which invites reciprocity in the drivers hurrying by. Many do lean on their horns, or beep them, and wave, and we responsively lift our hands and try for eye contact, which feels like a kind of rush-hour recognition and, better, a kind of fellow-traveler connection, almost a kind of stitching itself. After all these weeks, there are regular drive-bys. We don’t know each other, but we do know each other.
To be fair, some do not wave; some few make other gestures, which I take as a real-time vivid demonstration of our right, all of us, to disagree.
When I started, I did not like the sign I had most easily available. Its lettering is really too small to be read in traffic. I’ve chosen instead to wave an American flag on that corner, reclaiming it for my own part of the civic discourse.
In recent weeks, I’ve considered turning my flag upside down as a signal that the country I love is “in dire distress”, as flag lore has it. I believe this. Living in Minnesota, evidence is not hard to find: friends afraid to leave their apartments in my own building, others walking patrols in immigrant neighborhoods with whistles at the ready, a college freshman rattled by a pair of dark vehicles parked outside their library, immigrant-owned businesses closed, a flood of deeply unnerving online images, too many and too intimate to be discounted.
The evidence pours in. We read and listen and think and converse. I consider carrying my flag upside down.
A wise friend tells me that her visceral response to an upside down flag is that it means MAGA. Well, I won’t risk that, so… no with the upside-down.
My flag stays upright. I love my country. It is in dire distress. I resent my own uncertainty. If I stand on a corner, waving an American flag as a signal of dissent, will it be understood?
Or is that symbol – my bright flag, the flag of my childhood, my elementary school, my scout troop, my family veterans, the flag of the Fourth of July, of color guards, of my country’s checkered and inconstant history — no longer available to me?
How can this be?
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Photo by Roxanne Minnish | Pexels
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