It’s the season again, I suppose; after a year and change away from gatherings of my sweaty fellow Americans, and silent furled flags, I find myself faced with the same old challenge. The questions and facts that have created some uncomfortable noise in my head since pretty Miss Garrison in the first grade sent me to stand in the corner, because I wasn’t quite sure. I got to know that cold, gray, granite block corner all too well. But the questions would not leave me alone. What am I swearing allegiance to?
I was always a less than obedient child, that is not a point of pride or shame, for me. It’s just a fact. I was born that way. My dad never answered questions, he was a pain in the ass, he always said, “Figure it out!” I think he was pretty smart and he sure wasn’t lazy, so I guess he felt it just better to let me ponder all these things that cause such rage and confusion for me, and makes little sense. He left me to draw my own conclusions. I think of him in these moments, “Thanks Dad, this could have been a Hell of a lot easier if you’d just have given me the answers.”
So here I find myself again, unable to raise a hand in salute, or create some implied agency by placing my hand over my heart. I contemplate is my simply standing there, refusing to even mouth the words, because I’m just so tired of being me, not wanting to start another confrontation, is it an act of cowardice, or justified defiance?
My days of needing to cause protest and disruption and chaos have been replaced by a great need to be simply left alone.
Leave me here to silently suffer your patriotism and puffed-out chests and anthems.
I look around the room and wonder if one single person considers the word allegiance at all.
Two hundred and forty years of endless war, and Trail of Tears and the Federal Reserve.
I want to salute the flag of those brave sons-of-bitches who stormed that beach in Normandy and the many who died there. I want to salute the flag of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and Gene Kranz.
But the thought can’t leave me this is also the flag of the Vietnam war and the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about in 1962. It’s the flag of the 50,000 Americans who died in that war for no goddamned reason at all, except that from 1962 to Saigon’s fall in 1973 It pumped a trillion dollars into the veins of the economy—in today’s dollars.
It was also the flag of the men who murdered Emmett Till. It was the flag of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the people they owned. It’s the flag of seventeen million American kids who go to bed hungry every night. It’s the flag of too many who died because they couldn’t afford to get the care they needed, in the richest nation on earth.
It is the flag of the obscenely rich, it’s the flag of a poor who are so destitute their life is a living horror.
It’s as much my flag as your flag.
It was the flag of Mohammed Ali and Ty Cobb, the man Babe Ruth called “A racist bastard,” in 1922. It was the Babe’s flag too. It was Chuck Yeagers flag and Jack Ruby’s flag. It was the flag of the land that murdered of Malcolm X, and the flag of the country that hopefully will send Derek Chauvin away for life.
It is the flag of the only nation on earth to ever unleash the nuclear bomb on another nation.
I’ve got a lot to contemplate before I go swearing allegiance to any nation or any thing.
And, look out, here comes the Forth of July. The patriots will be out in force.
