The American Flag Belongs to Me, Too, and This Year I’m Taking It Back!

[Gerald]

NASHVILLE — We bought our house from a military veteran who hauled his flag out on every officially patriotic occasion. It hung from a flag mount embedded in the bark of a maple tree, and during our first years in the house we followed suit, at least on the Fourth of July.

Back then our neighborhood always threw a block party on the Fourth. Children decorated their bicycles and their dogs and careened down the street in what was generously referred to as a parade. Parents vaguely supervised the obligatory games — a three-legged race, an egg toss — but mostly we sat in the shade to chat until it was time for the potluck.

There was never any mention of politics. If I knew a neighbor’s party affiliation,https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/o...litics.htmland friends in those days granted one another the grace to assume that good will prevailed on both sides. We were all proud to be Americans, even if we didn’t agree about which aspects of our sprawling, messy democracy merited pride.

Traditionally, white Southerners aren’t big on the flag. The Fall of Vicksburg took place on July 4, 1863. A Civil War battle lost by the Confederacy on the anniversary of the founding of the Union meant that many Southerners considered the Fourth of July a Yankee holiday.https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/u...celebrate.html.

Take a drive through any red state, and you will see American flags flying above truck stops, dangling from construction cranes, stretched across the back windshields of cars, emblazoned on clothing and, of course, waving from front porches — and not just on the Fourth of July. “The sheer volume of American flag paraphernalia that white people seem to own boggles my mind,”https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/sta...ZImoOwHNECE2RA last month. “I assume it just sort of flows to them & they aren’t buying all of it? I’m not sure.”

I’m pretty sure white people are buying this stuff.

But not all of us. Old Glory has become such a strong a feature of Trump rallies that many liberals have all but rejected it, unwilling to embrace the symbol of a worldview that we find anathema. “Today, flying the flag from the back of a pickup truck or over a lawn is increasingly seen as a clue, albeit an imperfect one, to a person’s political affiliation in a deeply divided
nation,” Sarah Maslin Nir https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/n...e=articleShare.

My husband and I stopped hanging up our own flag years ago, long before it got usurped by the MAGA crowd. Our old maple tree had simply grown around the flag mount over the years, eventually enfolding it entirely, and we never got around to putting up another.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/02/o...-liberals.html

Note: July 2, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET