And For What Does It Stand?

I’ve been pondering how to translate my gut feeling about the NFL players kneeling during the anthem.  I’ve talked about it before (here and here), and then I ran across David Frum’s take on it in The Atlantic:

In the Civil War anthem, “Marching Through Georgia,” the stars and stripes is described as “the flag that makes you free”—but for most of the previous three-quarters of a century, it was anything but. It was the flag that flew over slave ships until 1808, the flag under which federal marshals enforced this country’s fugitive slave acts before the Civil War. Only the Civil War changed that flag’s character. Indeed, as Adam Goodheart observes in his remarkable history, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, it was not until the Civil War that the habit spread of flying the flag over private as well as federal buildings. It exacted hideous quantities of blood, from black and white soldiers alike, to wash that flag clean of its former meanings.

Maybe the washing has never been completed, and possibly it never will be. But that’s no reason to resign the flag and the anthem to the president. Colin Kaepernick has better right to that flag and anthem than Donald Trump. Why concede that right? Assert it.

Don’t take the knee. Stand for the flag; hand on heart for the anthem—and then put your signature to the demand that this least American of administrations be investigated down to its bottomest murk and filth.

Which isn’t quite what I was thinking, but is certainly an honorable shot at it. I’d say this to the outraged patriot:

You are outraged that the flag is so dishonored, and in your eyes it no doubt it is, as to you the flag stands for freedom from oppression, governmental and religious.

But I say to you, my friend, that you haven’t walked in the others’ shoes, and if you were to do so, you wouldn’t see the freedom you love and fought for waving on that field of stars, with those Revolutionary bars, but the hard faces of the police, pulling your car over because it’s above your station, and shooting you in the back as that fear nesting in your guts busts your self-control, and your flying heels are finally stilled by the cops’ flying lead. You’d see the empty refrigerator, the hungry infant, and the hopeless brothers, still defiant, like those Americans of yore, in the face of hopeless power.

This is the flag, do you see?

From the time when their ancestors were dragged screaming into the holds of the slavers, there to learn the ways of the whip, that was the flag for them, waving over that beautiful masted ship in the African harbor, soon to fly over the sea to the auctioneers’ cruel podium.

Then on to cruel masters, and the scent of revolution in the air.  Not that of Washington and Jefferson, no, nor that of Davis, but a revolt of those very cattle the masters thought to use for their own pecuniary advantages.  They were stripped of that so-vaunted Liberty that this flag stood for.  The masters of the flag, fearful of uprising, until those slaves were stripped and whipped and killed, simply as an example.

This is the flag, do you see?

Then that symbol was waved in their faces for brief, luscious moments, and heroes arose; Carver, Tubman, and Douglass, iron spines they had, and minds to match. But the doors clashed shut, and despite their desperate efforts to find a place, to lend a hand, to serve next to you, rare was that accepted.  Their fighting for Pershing met with the jeers of provincials, afraid of the competition. Along came yet another war, and still the restraints held, although the wisest of the wise cried out for the escorts of the 99th Fighter Squadron.

But then, even our children said they could not stand to be in the same classroom as those little black kids.  It was all so terrible, having to share.  And so they were shut away and fed inferior education, because, well, maybe the different are dangerous and unworthy. And they had to endure the random fury of the white madmen, killing them for no reason, falling from the trees, it’s a circus, isn’t it, to watch your relatives jerk and shout at the end of that baleful rope.

This is the flag, do you see?

And along came Vietnam, and who served the most? Not those of privileged houses, scions of war-like families? No, you have the means to avoid active duty.  But the black man had little choice but to serve in this war of collective madness and paranoia, so many flags waving in parades and planes and shells and napalm, covering up the cripples and dead civilians and the hatred engendered by the invading blessed country. So many lost to enemy and gang, the collective bleed is an outrage to see.

This is your flag, can’t you see? Are you so proud of it now, as it flies in the lee?  Is their outrage such a mystery? Do you feel the blood between your toes, their borrowed shoes brimming with the leavings of those wrapped in the flag?

And yet, can you see, even today, their desire is the same as yours – a just flag – a flag to honor and love – and a symbol of all those ideals which can make us great?

This is our flag, but it must stand for the same things. Are you willing to work for that vision? Or will you, yes, you, dishonor it by spitting and disrespecting those who’ve paid so much more than you, and look with sad, tired eyes to a future without gleam?