July 4, 2022
My decision not to fly the flag today wasn’t an easy one.
I was raised by a veteran of the Korean War. My stepfather, Jerry, served in both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force. He left the Navy with a giant tattoo of a battleship on his upper arm and the Air Force with a Silver Star. As most men of his generation, he never talked much about the war, other than a story he regularly told about his eyebrows being burned off. He did, however, teach me how to dribble a basketball and shoot a BB gun and how to respect the United States flag.
On every federal holiday, Jerry would ceremoniously slide the flagpole into a bracket permanently affixed to the front column of our house, so when I grew up and bought my first house, one of the first things my husband and I did was purchase a flag of our own. In the past four decades, that flag has flown on hundreds of holidays, and in the aftermath of 9/11, we flew it daily for weeks. In all that time, our flag has never touched the ground, and darkness has never touched it. When my son was young and all his friends were sporting their flag-decorated t-shirts for the 4th of July, I explained to him that we don’t wear the flag. We don’t decorate with the flag. We don’t buy mattresses from stores that use the flag to promote sales. And we certainly don’t use napkins printed with flags to wipe our mouths.
Yes, the flag means something to me. It is a symbol of every soldier who fought and died for our country, but more importantly, it is reminder of a stepfather I loved, an airman who once risked his life to save a pilot from a burning airplane.
Unfortunately that same flag has come to mean something entirely different to many of my countrymen. People who claim to be patriots but are only self-serving hucksters now wrap themselves in it while white supremacists carry it in their parades and insurrectionists through the halls of our capitol.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how close we came to losing our democracy on January 6, 2021. As many, I’ve watched the congressional hearings these last few weeks in horror while never realizing that there are more ways than one to lose your country. On January 6th, we were saved by men and women of integrity who honored their oath to our Constitution. Unfortunately, it was all for naught because on Friday, June 25th, six citizens of questionable character managed to accomplish what those thousands of armed insurrectionists could not. They began the process of turning our democracy into a fundamentalist Christian caliphate.
I saw the calls on social media to fly our flags upside down today, and I seriously considered it…never in my life have I felt our country in such peril…but I realized it would be a hollow gesture. The flag can’t save us any more than we can save it. So I’ve decided not to fly it at all. Not today and not ever again. Instead I will remove it from its pole, fold it neatly, and put it in a box. Then tomorrow, I will deliver it to my local VFW. I will request that my flag be respectfully discharged from service, and I will find another way to honor my stepfather.
