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My Flag
This is an article that I wrote, dealing with patriotism and what America, and especially the American flag, means to me.
16 September 2001
MY FLAG
By: Mark Lipman
You know, I've been seeing a lot of American flags around lately and I really don't think I know what they mean. I have my American flag here and I can tell you, I know what my flag means. I bought my flag over a month ago. I bought it right after coming out of the National Parks in Utah. I found it in a little antique shop and why I stopped in that store was because I was looking for a special flag, one that represented what I felt America was.
The store was built like a log cabin and each individual log was painted a color of the American flag, red ... white ... blue. It just cried out: "America"; of the little idiosyncrasies that we have, the special things, the different things that make this country unique.
I'd gone in there and said that I wanted to buy an American flag and the woman kinda looked at me funny, then started showing me the flags that she had, but I really didn't see anything that felt special. Then she said, "well there's this one here." The fabric is a very thin cotton and each stitch was sewn by hand and you could just feel the love that went into making this flag.
Now, when I look at my flag, what I see is the America of Robert Frost, the America of Walt Whitman, the America of Ansel Adams, the America of all those, who throughtheir words and through their pictures made America come alive for all of us. And made us believe, as they believed, in the founding principles of this country: that all men were created equal; in liberty and justice for all; that this was a new world, a world of freedom, a world of freedom of religion, a world where you could believe what you
wanted to believe, without fear of intolerance; a world where we believe in justice and truth; a world that we could be proud of.
And when I see the world around me, the calls for war; the attacking of mosques and Arab-Americans; the hatred in the eyes of men and women across the nation; and I see that we still judge, and are still judged, by the color of our skin; where justice means to kill more innocent civilians ... when I see all of this, I just wonder what do all your American flags mean to you?
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§my/your/our flag
Thanks for your thoughtful and thought provoking piece on the flag. The other night, a friend of mine left a message for me, asking a simple question: "What do you think of when you look at the flag?" I stopped and thought about it, and unfortunately, my first thoughts were of all the questions it raised for me - "Who did this?", "Why did they do it?", Why didn't we see it coming?", "How could our leaders let it come?" As I sought answers to these and many other questions over the past week, I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the reflexive flag-waving being promoted by our government and it's instruments of propoganda. I understand what motivates people to turn to the flag at times like this. It represents the promise of a better world - one that is especially attractive when things look so grim. However, to truly honor what it represents, we must continuously subject it to the test. We must engage in critical thinking about all that our flag represents, the good and the bad. We do a disservice to the values the flag represents if we do not also contemplate the dastardly deeds that have been done under it's protection. Only if we are willing to constantly defend those values, both with respect to others, as well as ourselves, that we can claim that it represents all that is good about our country. So, I say, use the flag to confront the truth about all that it has represented to people around the world, and start to work to preserve it's meaning when it is consistent with our positive values, and to change it's meaning when it leads to horrors such as what we witnessed last week.
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