Take Back the Flag!

Sometime in the 1960s a small group of anti-war activists burned an American flag. It was a potent symbolic act, that spread quickly. Soon flags were burning at demonstrations against the US government's criminal Viet Nam adventure in public places across the land. The intent was to show the demonstrators' disgust with the policies that had transformed Old Glory from the standard of Liberty to the symbol of tyranny for oppressed people around the world. It may have been an understandable expression of anger, but as is all to often the case with acts committed in anger these flag burnings have had consequences, fateful consequences, far beyond that time and those circumstances.

For most people in the world, their national flag is little more than a rectangle of colored cloth fluttering in the wind. The American flag, to Americans, has from the very beginnings of the nation had a special deeper and passionately held meaning. The American flag stands for the great ideals upon which the nation was founded: Freedom, Justice, Equality. Opposition to the Viet Nam war was international. If a demonstrator in France burned an American flag, it simply expressed a disgust with the actions of the US government, with no clear understanding of the deep wounds caused in the breasts of Americans watching on the TV news. If a demonstrator in the US burned the flag, he effectively told the TV audience that he was spitting on those great ideals. The irony, of course, was that Americans opposed to the war were motivated by a passionate love of those ideals.

So flag burning was a tragic tactical and strategic error. Tactical in that it alienated countless citizens whose better instincts must surely have led them to join the opposition. Strategically in that the very forces bent upon perverting those great ideals have been able to claim exclusive rights to the flag as a symbol. This perversion may have been most visible in the tempest in a teapot over Obama's failure to wear a flag pin during the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Make no mistake, the forces of bigotry and hate are well organized, they are passionate, they are cunning and media-savvy. And they are well aware of the potency of the flag's symbolism. To a terrifying degree they have succeeded in making the flag the symbol, not of Freedom, Justice and Equality but of their opposites. They have succeeded in this by subverting the very meaning of those noble words, by debasing those noble ideals. And in so doing they have somehow succeeded in marginalizing truth and honesty, and have dragged the nation's entire body politic inexorably to the right, to a point where once moderate liberal positions have come to seem radical, once extreme conservative positions moderate. Wherever they gather to express their hateful gospel, there you will see the American flag prominently displayed. At rallies opposing women's right of ownership of their own bodies, there you will see the flag. At speeches denouncing the human rights of gays, there you will see the flag. On internet blogs supporting the small arms industry's insistence on their untrammeled ability to peddle lethal weaponry, there you will see the flag. And on and on. And on.

Enough!

It is time to take back the flag! It is time for those who are still proud to believe in America's noble ideals, who believe in the country's potential for true greatness to restore the flag as their symbol, our symbol.

If you believe in Freedom, if you believe in Justice, if you believe in Equality, if you stand for Human Rights, if you insist on Human Dignity, if these are the ideals you stand for, then take back the flag, it belongs to you! Wear the flag, fly the flag, carry the flag, not with irony, with pride. If they ask you why, tell them it's because you are proud to hold to the values the flag represents.

By living those ideals, by speaking up for those ideals, by demonstrating for those ideals and by showing the flag as we do so, we can take it back. And by taking back the flag, we can take back the country, transform it once again into a beacon of hope.