Am I dreaming?
Last week as I walked the dog, I noticed more houses with flags displayed. When I got home, I took ours out of the closet where it sits except for Memorial Day and July 4, and I hung it out.
It’s a small gesture, the only thing I can think of to do to express how I feel in these surreal days when our unanimous outrage at injustice, and total solidarity in demanding reform, have been warped and defaced into irrational calls to disband law enforcement entirely and surrender to riots and mob rule.
Incredibly, the American flag has become an offense to many. In the same way the Lincoln Memorial — the monument honoring the president who waged literal war against slavery and took a bullet for achieving success — was defaced in the name of stopping racism, the flag is burned and despised as a symbol of oppression.
The flag, to me, represents our high ideals of equality and justice for everyone of every color. It stands for freedom — of speech, of religion, of self-definition. It’s these ideals that have enabled us to leverage great advances toward ending racism, advances that should inspire us as we confront and further eliminate the ways it still exists. There is no slavery here; segregation is illegal; we have had a two-term black president. No one can say our ideals are empty or insincere. They have raised us up many levels since they were written in our founding documents, imposing a rigorous demand that we become better as a people.
In this crisis, instead of drawing together on the common ground of our ideals, we have total breakdown. Instead of freedom of speech, the nation’s flagship newspaper caves to censors and announces that it will work harder to limit its editorial page to in-house thinkers. The tech industry, a few months before an election, suddenly begins selectively censoring political speech. Individuals are publicly shamed for not expressing the right opinions. Instead of freedom of religion, churches in many states, including mine, are barred from meeting, while huge crowds jostle in public spaces to express rage with the full approval of some political leaders. Instead of freedom of self-definition, we have, undoubtedly, individuals in powerful positions whose enforcement of law or governance simply railroad whole populations. Sometimes it’s driven by racism. Other times, it’s driven by pure greed and lust for power. We are a democratic republic, but instead of government “by the people, for the people,” we have sweeping and mindless changes like eliminating police departments without a single vote being taken.
Does no one remember 9/11? The police running into those burning buildings while everyone else ran out? The enormous respect we paid those who remained after so many were crushed and burned when the buildings collapsed? We held them in high regard, as we should; they are public servants, putting themselves at risk for our protection. They must be held accountable to high standards, and none should be permitted to fall short as egregiously as the officers we saw in Minneapolis. There must be reforms put in place to ensure that it stops happening. But abolishing the police? Who in their right mind would do that?
I heard lots of outrage that the leader of the free world held up a Bible in front of a church vandals had set ablaze. Though I wasn’t sure what the image was supposed to convey, I was not offended by it. Though we are not a theocracy, it is the Bible’s view of people as being made in God’s image and therefore of great worth that undergirds our expectation of liberty and justice for all.
I am much more offended by the torching of our common core of values — freedom, justice, equality, personal liberty rather than federal tyranny — in the name of peaceful protest. The only way forward is together.
The only means available to me to express this idea is the flag: a physical symbol of one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
