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| The Weigh In | by Dana Place | |
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Sitting outside today smoking a cigarette, trying to push the workday along a little faster I noticed something I just had to talk about this week. Our maintenance man, a man who barely spoke any kind of English, was standing out at the flagpole in front of our office talking to this woman. He is a nice guy, we hang out and smoke and chit chat about where he was from, when he came here, that kind of thing, and it didn’t seem strange that he was talking to this woman until I noticed what he was talking to her about. He was explaining to her, in Spanish (I got the impression that it was both of their first language), about the little intricacies of putting up and taking down the American flag each day. How carefully he handled it when he took it down and put it back up, not touching the ground, what type of knot you were supposed to use, when and when not to raise the flag to the top of the pole, among other things I really couldn’t make out. It just made me wonder why a man with no real ties to America before he came here would leave the country he was from and move here. Why, if the only reason he was here was for a better job and a better way of life, did he hold our symbols in such high regard. The way he handled that flag gave me the impression he really cared about it, and was trying to convey that to her. Now, I am 29 years old and I was born and raised here in the United States, more specifically, in Texas, and I must have looked up at that flag thousands of times over the course of my life. There are times I have looked at it and it meant more than other times. Times of national emergency, times when things in the news make me proud to live in this country, and other times when I read the news and just shake my head in wonder. But on the whole it has always just been a nice reminder of the place I am proud to live. I consider myself pretty intelligent and I read enough to know the history of the symbols of our freedom, smart enough to academically understand the cost to keep them, and how fortunate I am to be able to take advantage. But, and I suppose that is all they are, symbols. I was fortunate enough to spend some of my college time in California and was able to get a completely different view of the world than I had seen growing up in Texas City. One morning, our political science professor started a fairly heated argument about the importance of symbols in a society and whether or not these symbols should be given legal weight more than any other object i.e.. flag burning. Should it actually be illegal to burn an item that is nothing more than a piece of cloth, regardless of it’s social significance (to most of the people back home the thought would be without question unconscionable). His point was that the act of protestation against that symbol was actually more important than the actual symbol itself. And at the time that seemed pretty reasonable. I mention this argument only because I have a clear definitive answer. An answer for which there really is no academic reasoning. One that you can only explain to the guy that prays to a wooden cross in the middle of the night. Tangible symbols of things we cannot see or touch allow us to believe more firmly in the ideals behind them. Freedom, Liberty, and all the intangibles that we talk about and are glad we have are wrapped in that cloth behind those 50 stars and remind us why the men that have fought and died to allow us to argue the point. No matter where in the world that flag may stand. It took a man who wasn’t even born here to remind me of that fact. So, now that Memorial Day is around the corner, please take a second to remember the men and women that bleed and have bled under that symbol to make sure people here and around the world could understand just what those words mean.
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