We were driving through Ronald, a quiet country town along the eastern crest of the Cascade Range in Washington, when we saw our first American flag; red, white, and blue, blowing in the wind on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
“Whenever I see that flag now, I get nervous,” said my friend Teddy from the passenger seat. “American flags and big pickups.”
On cue, the row of fluttering flags gave way to a massive billboard: “Trump/Pence 2020.” Less than a day after 75,000 marched in silent protest against racial injustice in Seattle, we didn’t see a single Black Lives Matter sign in Ronald. Not even a flyer. But the flags continued to wave—a world apart, and a reality all the same.
My friend’s comment struck me. I have to blame my own naiveté on this one, but, until recently, the flag had always been a symbol of where I come from. Maybe pride is too strong of a word to explain exactly how I felt seeing the Stars and Stripes, but at the very least I saw it as a cultural identifier.
That’s changed.
To hear my friend say that the flag hanging in his classroom, emblazoned across his American passport, and flying above the soccer stadiums he grew up playing in (and that many of his teammates ended up representing at an international level) made him nervous—even afraid—was a punch to the gut, a sucker punch to the kidney. Worse still, I know he’s right.
More than ever, the American flag has become divisive—a weapon of hate cloaked in faux-patriotism. Suddenly a global identifier has become a banner for mistreating neighbors, people of color, and those of different belief systems.
We’ve talked the Colin Kaepernick situation to death, about his audacious disrespect for the flag (which his silent and peaceful protest was never, EVER, about), but what is obvious now is that the entire circus around Kap’s actions was a rallying point for transforming a symbol of peace and unity into something else entirely. Somehow it became a call from the highest position in the land to ostracize a citizen with legitimate concerns for the safety of his fellow citizens, all justified by a piece of cloth that increasingly represents the few.
Our flag is no longer ours. Many would argue that it never was, but there is no doubt that the American flag of 2020 has been co-opted so drastically, that it’s hard to recognize what it stood for in the first place.
Eric Trump laid it bare at the Republican National Convention at the beginning of September:
“Under President Trump, freedom will never be a thing of the past. That’s what a vote for Donald Trump represents.” Now, pay attention here. “It’s a vote for the American spirit, the American dream, and for the American flag.”
A single man synonymous with a national symbol. Those are fighting words. Those are battle lines drawn. The message seems clear: If you don’t blindly tramp with Trump into the ether, you cannot wave the American flag, much less be American. I hesitate to draw on historical tyrants, but you can’t help but draw some parallels here. That toxic rhetoric has more than tainted the well, it has poisoned it for generations to come.
During times of great strife and tragedy, the flag has served to unite a population. Now, in one of the most consequential periods of United States history, that symbol has only worked to divide it.
What do we do with a flag that no longer stands for the good of its people? Somedays, it’s honestly hard to imagine untangling the venomous strands that are currently strangling it, to surgically remove the fear the banner has already instilled in so many. During the silent march, I only saw a single American flag above thousands of black-clad marchers. It was flying upside down, the stars pointed toward the street while the bars stacked up toward the sky. It was a simple gesture, but a poignant one. We are not living in the America that our flag was born into, and we need a symbol that reflects that. It’s time for a change. For starters, it’s time to recognize that we may not have always been part of an upside-down nation, but we’re sure living in one now.