RSS 2.0
Happy Flag Day–Fly It Proudly
James Robbins has a good piece up at NRO on the history Flag Day.
. . . But what does the holiday mean? Rather, what is the meaning of the flag? We know its visceral effect, its power as a symbol. The “rally around the flag†effect in times of crisis is more than a slogan. We saw that response after the 9/11 attacks, a proliferation of stars and stripes, as Americans instinctively sought a way to express their solidarity in the face of a foreign threat to our way of life. For a time, Old Glory was omnipresent. Too brief a time.
But the flag is always on hand to inspire, to motivate, to stir our sense of something larger than ourselves. It is an emblem of ideals, and of our history. We fly the flag, we honor it, but not from blind patriotism, not allegiance without reflection. In Wilson’s 1917 speech he observed that the flag “has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours.†We define what the flag means, to the United States, to the rest of the world. The flag absent the ideals of the Founders, lacking citizens who uphold those ideals, has no meaning at all. The active engagement of those ideals, their concrete expression, is what gives the flag its strength. Through our actions, the policies of our government, the way we lead our daily lives, we give the flag its meaning and purpose. The flag is a call to duty, to the country, our communities, ourselves. It is a marker laid down by a people, by a nation, engaged in the greatest experiment in freedom in human history.
Every day is Flag Day.
There is a clash of ideals on display in the debate over Iraq.
Here are the ideals of those who wish to get out of Iraq immediately: moral equivalence, ambivalence, betrayal, retreat, and surrender.
Here are the ideals of those who wish to stay: moral clarity, freedom, perseverance, courage, bravery, and fidelity. These are the ideals that the flag invokes and these are the ideals that it calls us to today.