As a Republican president once said, “There you go again.”
I was surprised to see my name invoked in Capt. Thomas Kelly’s Jan. 27 BDN OpEd supporting the Freeport flag ladies, particularly since the decade-ago event he brought up (which I joined but did not lead) was not about flags.
The “fasting vigil” mentioned, actually a “Bring the Troops Home Fast” (deliberate double entendre there), was in fact in support of the troops, and against a government policy that sent our good, patriotic men and women into an unnecessary war that had nothing to do with our national security, or with the flags people were waving after 9/11.
Please don’t confuse patriotism with blind loyalty to bad government decisions.
Yes, that peace action in 2006 was indeed history repeating itself — flash back five decades, when, in 1966 as a very young military wife I saw my young Seabee husband off to his first of two tours in Vietnam. It wasn’t the war protests back here at home that broke morale, it was what happened, what he and his military peers experienced firsthand in that far-off land, that broke that morale. Just ask members of Veterans for Peace, who have seen the horrors of self-inflicted wars up close and personal.
I may not have served directly, but I am surely a veteran of that war, as we all are, as a nation, in every “conflict” over the years to which we have been subjected.
As for flag-waving, the author may not have known about my first book, which came out in 1996. It is titled “Proud to Be a Card-Carrying, Flag-Waving, Patriotic American Liberal.” So I’m not new to the concept.
After 9/11, I waved the flag. We all did. At that point in time it expressed simple love of country, along with a profound sadness over what had been done to us. And for the flag ladies in Freeport, I’m sure the flag still represents that straightforward love of country.
But as the body counts abroad added up after that horrific event in New York City, and the mistakes, deliberate distortions and outright lies by government officials multiplied and multiply still, waving that flag has morphed in many people’s minds into an expression of support, not of a beloved country, but of a government whose bad decisions and policies have been sending good people, ours and theirs, to their deaths.
The flag, our flag, any flag, is a symbol. Symbols are not things in and of themselves, but by definition represent other things. What a symbol, in this case a flag, represents can and does differ in the minds of different people. The flags burned in the 1960s in protest of the Vietnam War were clearly anti-government, not anti-American. (I’m trying hard here not to say anti-homeland, since that WWII language gives me the creeps.)
To marginalize or dismiss the effect of flag-waving on someone who lost a family member in 9/11 or its aftermath is to demonstrate that yes, Capt. Kelly missed something. And criticizing pacifist protests as being bad for morale is (pardon the militaristic analogy) shooting the messenger. Contrary to his insisting otherwise, such protests are indeed, must be, about “how or why we got into the war.” Sending our good military men and women off to sacrifice life, limb and sanity without a serious threat to national security is outrageous and unjustified, and must be challenged.
Yes indeed, history keeps repeating itself, whether 10 or 50 years ago. And that is where we are again today, in Freeport and elsewhere across the globe, with different people and groups overlaying conflicting representations and meanings onto the same symbol — our flag, our red, white and blue, our Stars and Stripes.
But, as they also say, if we don’t learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.
Jean Hay Bright, a UMaine graduate and author of three books, was the last Democratic challenger to Sen. Olympia Snowe. Now semi-retired, she and her second husband, David Bright, own a small organic farm in Dixmont.