You remember the flags, right?
While it was common to see Republicans and others of moderate to conservative persuasions wearing small American lapel flags—with only a few exceptions, one was hard pressed to find any “street” Democrats with them on. In fact I'll venture it was more likely to find a hundred albino mules wearing purple top hats and singing God Bless America before you could find a street Liberal Democrat wearing an American lapel flag. So maybe it just seemed like almost everyone was flying our flag. Maybe it was overwhelmingly Republicans and Independents with some conservative Democrats who put them up. I think the Liberal Democrats took a pass on the entire patriotic, flag waving exercise. Apparently not even the most horrendous attacks on our homeland, ever, motivated them enough to feel at least some sense of indignation, not to mention outrage. There is certainly a large amount of evidence to support this proposition.
How many of you remember that even before the smoke had cleared at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, and at the field in Pennsylvania, Liberal Democrats were already telling us that we should have expected such a thing, that we deserved to be attacked because we are not good people—that our sincerity, our intentions, our very reason to exist as a nation are all suspect. Time and time again, they tried to convince us that we are a dishonorable, greedy, imperialistic nation with a singular desire to suck the lifeblood out of every other nation in the world. They had already convinced millions of their Liberal followers—our fellow Americans—to, essentially, hate America. They attempted to make us feel ashamed to be American. They ridiculed and demeaned anyone who unabashedly expressed their patriotism. I think it a safe bet that not a single Liberal Democrat ever said, “Remember 9/11.” Even though we were at war against a demonstrably real enemy whose sole purpose was too kill every American they could, we had no battle cry because thanks to the Liberal Democrats and their left-leaning media affiliates, there was no clear, clean, robust sense of identity and pride among millions of Americans. While millions of Republicans and some Independents displayed full-fledged patriotism in the best sense, millions of Liberal Democrats were acting like America-hating-bashers of the worst kind.
For years, Liberal Democrats have been playing a deadly smoke and mirror game in which they have convinced their political base plus much of the world, including our enemies, that the United States of America is a bad country not to be trusted. Of course they could not be more wrong and if they had the desire and took an honest look at our history compared to all other nations in the history of mankind they would know that we are the most honorable and the most giving nation ever.
But for now the answer to “Why did we put all the flags away so quickly?” is that too many of us allowed a minority of our citizenry to confuse us about our national identity and to intimidate us into feeling embarrassed by our patriotism. Of course, that, my friends, is not only unacceptable on its face—it is a threat to our very existence. By any honestly informed measure, the United States of America is in fact the greatest nation in the history of the world. We must not only know that to be true, we must also truly appreciate our great good fortune to be among its citizens and to speak out and stand up against all unfair criticism and attempts to destroy our true national identity.
So it is imperative that we have a clear understanding of what our flag represents. It is the symbol of all things good in America and of the uniqueness of those things. Our constitution stands alone in the history of mankind. No other political document guarantees such freedom to its citizens or the protection against tyranny as does ours. It should also remind us of those who have sacrificed so much for the freedom we enjoy each and every day. But it does not end there. Our flag also stands for what we aspire to going forward toward an ever-improving nation of people of goodwill. This is America! People want in, not out. Fly our flag and feel pride in what it represents. It represents us and tells the world who we are.
© Robert D. McKinley
All rights reserved.
Remember 9/11? You know, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania? You do remember, don’t you? Of course you do. Remember all the flags? They were everywhere; we put them on car windows, we made bumper stickers; we flew them on lawns and porches; and yes, they were even in classrooms. They were everywhere. So what happened? Where did all the flags go? Of course that is a rhetorical question because we all know where they went—we took them down and we put them away.
So the big question is: “Why did we put all the flags away so quickly?” But first, let's understand why we put them up in the first place. No one made us go to the stores and buy American flags by the millions and put them on almost everything we could think of. Unlike some countries, no one ordered us to do it. We did it spontaneously. In fact, some of us did it instinctively. Men, women, and children of every color, religion, political persuasion, rich, middle class, less fortunate, young, old, whoever—bought flags and stuck them on and flew them from all kinds of things. At the time, I thought we did it because vicious, heartless zealots had attacked us and murdered almost 3,000 of our fellow countrymen without warning and we were apalled and angry and defiant and we were expressing our outrage and solidarity against the attackers. I thought we put the flags up to tell the world we did not deserve that kind of treatment nor would we sit idly by and do nothing about it or fail to defend ourselves from further abuse. I thought we displayed the flags to tell each other and the rest of the world that we were proud Americans and to show them we stood as one, determined to bring justice to the despicable terrorists who had attacked us.
To see the flags everywhere and to witness the apparent expression of patriotism they represented produced conflicting emotions in me. My first emotion was pride—pride in my fellow Americans for responding so swiftly and unequivocally to the biggest most atrocious attack on our homeland, ever. These monsters had not even bothered to limit their attacks to military targets; instead they consciously chose to murder innocent, defenseless men, women, and children. So the intitial response of my fellow Americans reminded me of the America I knew as a boy growing up during the Second World War. Still, to be honest, part of me was uneasy—unsure of the genuineness of it all. I saw a lot of flags during the long years of the Second World War too, but there was at least one essential difference back then: There was a clear sense of national identity that had its roots in the same fundamental values held by our founding fathers. We had an unambiguous national character. In other words, we knew who we were and what we stood for. We understood very clearly that we were at war against enemies who wanted to destroy us and the flags we put up then stayed up for the duration of the war. Another difference was that back then we often reminded each other to “Remember Pearl Harbor” because that was something we never wanted to forget, nor did we want to let anyone else forget it. It was a rallying cry.
So you see, it was different back then. During WWII, we were proud to be Americans and patriotism was as natural as breathing. We flew the American flag because it symbolized all the good values our country stood for so we flew it proudly. There was no equivocation. There were no grey areas. There was nothing to “nuance.” We were Americans. It wasn’t Pollyanna; we knew our history and we knew we lived in the greatest country that ever existed on planet earth.
So what happened so quickly after September 11, 2001 to make us take the flags down and put them away?
Just as surely as we had reasons to put the flags up, we had reasons to take them down. Yet I believe the reasons we took them down are not as clear nor as honorable as why we put them up. I think we, intuitively, got it right when we put them up and then got it wrong when we took them down. We did not put the flags away because the terrorists had a change of heart; nor had they surrendered. According to all credible estimates, the War On Terrorism had no immediate end in sight. So why did the flags disappear so quickly? First, let's try to understand exactly who put them up. I now believe that immediately after 9/11 certain groups of Americans expressed their patriotism more than others by displaying more flags than those who were slow to display flags or those who abstained completely. I also believe that those who did not display our flag were the same people who later influenced millions of Americans to take them down. They made it uncomfortable for proud Americans who displayed our flag for all the right reasons and embarrassed some into taking them down by defining patriotism as something bad—as some kind of intellectually deficient concept to be shunned and derided.
So the big question is: “Why did we put all the flags away so quickly?” But first, let's understand why we put them up in the first place. No one made us go to the stores and buy American flags by the millions and put them on almost everything we could think of. Unlike some countries, no one ordered us to do it. We did it spontaneously. In fact, some of us did it instinctively. Men, women, and children of every color, religion, political persuasion, rich, middle class, less fortunate, young, old, whoever—bought flags and stuck them on and flew them from all kinds of things. At the time, I thought we did it because vicious, heartless zealots had attacked us and murdered almost 3,000 of our fellow countrymen without warning and we were apalled and angry and defiant and we were expressing our outrage and solidarity against the attackers. I thought we put the flags up to tell the world we did not deserve that kind of treatment nor would we sit idly by and do nothing about it or fail to defend ourselves from further abuse. I thought we displayed the flags to tell each other and the rest of the world that we were proud Americans and to show them we stood as one, determined to bring justice to the despicable terrorists who had attacked us.
To see the flags everywhere and to witness the apparent expression of patriotism they represented produced conflicting emotions in me. My first emotion was pride—pride in my fellow Americans for responding so swiftly and unequivocally to the biggest most atrocious attack on our homeland, ever. These monsters had not even bothered to limit their attacks to military targets; instead they consciously chose to murder innocent, defenseless men, women, and children. So the intitial response of my fellow Americans reminded me of the America I knew as a boy growing up during the Second World War. Still, to be honest, part of me was uneasy—unsure of the genuineness of it all. I saw a lot of flags during the long years of the Second World War too, but there was at least one essential difference back then: There was a clear sense of national identity that had its roots in the same fundamental values held by our founding fathers. We had an unambiguous national character. In other words, we knew who we were and what we stood for. We understood very clearly that we were at war against enemies who wanted to destroy us and the flags we put up then stayed up for the duration of the war. Another difference was that back then we often reminded each other to “Remember Pearl Harbor” because that was something we never wanted to forget, nor did we want to let anyone else forget it. It was a rallying cry.
So you see, it was different back then. During WWII, we were proud to be Americans and patriotism was as natural as breathing. We flew the American flag because it symbolized all the good values our country stood for so we flew it proudly. There was no equivocation. There were no grey areas. There was nothing to “nuance.” We were Americans. It wasn’t Pollyanna; we knew our history and we knew we lived in the greatest country that ever existed on planet earth.
So what happened so quickly after September 11, 2001 to make us take the flags down and put them away?
Just as surely as we had reasons to put the flags up, we had reasons to take them down. Yet I believe the reasons we took them down are not as clear nor as honorable as why we put them up. I think we, intuitively, got it right when we put them up and then got it wrong when we took them down. We did not put the flags away because the terrorists had a change of heart; nor had they surrendered. According to all credible estimates, the War On Terrorism had no immediate end in sight. So why did the flags disappear so quickly? First, let's try to understand exactly who put them up. I now believe that immediately after 9/11 certain groups of Americans expressed their patriotism more than others by displaying more flags than those who were slow to display flags or those who abstained completely. I also believe that those who did not display our flag were the same people who later influenced millions of Americans to take them down. They made it uncomfortable for proud Americans who displayed our flag for all the right reasons and embarrassed some into taking them down by defining patriotism as something bad—as some kind of intellectually deficient concept to be shunned and derided.
While it was common to see Republicans and others of moderate to conservative persuasions wearing small American lapel flags—with only a few exceptions, one was hard pressed to find any “street” Democrats with them on. In fact I'll venture it was more likely to find a hundred albino mules wearing purple top hats and singing God Bless America before you could find a street Liberal Democrat wearing an American lapel flag. So maybe it just seemed like almost everyone was flying our flag. Maybe it was overwhelmingly Republicans and Independents with some conservative Democrats who put them up. I think the Liberal Democrats took a pass on the entire patriotic, flag waving exercise. Apparently not even the most horrendous attacks on our homeland, ever, motivated them enough to feel at least some sense of indignation, not to mention outrage. There is certainly a large amount of evidence to support this proposition.
How many of you remember that even before the smoke had cleared at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, and at the field in Pennsylvania, Liberal Democrats were already telling us that we should have expected such a thing, that we deserved to be attacked because we are not good people—that our sincerity, our intentions, our very reason to exist as a nation are all suspect. Time and time again, they tried to convince us that we are a dishonorable, greedy, imperialistic nation with a singular desire to suck the lifeblood out of every other nation in the world. They had already convinced millions of their Liberal followers—our fellow Americans—to, essentially, hate America. They attempted to make us feel ashamed to be American. They ridiculed and demeaned anyone who unabashedly expressed their patriotism. I think it a safe bet that not a single Liberal Democrat ever said, “Remember 9/11.” Even though we were at war against a demonstrably real enemy whose sole purpose was too kill every American they could, we had no battle cry because thanks to the Liberal Democrats and their left-leaning media affiliates, there was no clear, clean, robust sense of identity and pride among millions of Americans. While millions of Republicans and some Independents displayed full-fledged patriotism in the best sense, millions of Liberal Democrats were acting like America-hating-bashers of the worst kind.
For years, Liberal Democrats have been playing a deadly smoke and mirror game in which they have convinced their political base plus much of the world, including our enemies, that the United States of America is a bad country not to be trusted. Of course they could not be more wrong and if they had the desire and took an honest look at our history compared to all other nations in the history of mankind they would know that we are the most honorable and the most giving nation ever.
But for now the answer to “Why did we put all the flags away so quickly?” is that too many of us allowed a minority of our citizenry to confuse us about our national identity and to intimidate us into feeling embarrassed by our patriotism. Of course, that, my friends, is not only unacceptable on its face—it is a threat to our very existence. By any honestly informed measure, the United States of America is in fact the greatest nation in the history of the world. We must not only know that to be true, we must also truly appreciate our great good fortune to be among its citizens and to speak out and stand up against all unfair criticism and attempts to destroy our true national identity.
So it is imperative that we have a clear understanding of what our flag represents. It is the symbol of all things good in America and of the uniqueness of those things. Our constitution stands alone in the history of mankind. No other political document guarantees such freedom to its citizens or the protection against tyranny as does ours. It should also remind us of those who have sacrificed so much for the freedom we enjoy each and every day. But it does not end there. Our flag also stands for what we aspire to going forward toward an ever-improving nation of people of goodwill. This is America! People want in, not out. Fly our flag and feel pride in what it represents. It represents us and tells the world who we are.
© Robert D. McKinley
All rights reserved.
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