[This was originally posted as Six Flags, January 2021]
I don’t recall American flags flying outside my childhood homes, but they did – every Fourth of July, at least. I suspect we may have flown them more often but have no recollection of it and I’m not sure why that is. My parents have always loved America, and my family has proudly served it in years past.
My uncle on my mother’s side was an Air Force veteran who served in Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. My mother lost her first fiancé in Vietnam, a Marine whose support UH-64 helo was shot down during Operation Texas in 1966. Her second husband, my stepfather, was a former L.A. cop and probably one of Rush Limbaugh’s earliest and most dedicated fans. They loved America and flew the flag but not continuously. The peacetime eighties and nineties didn’t seem to warrant it.
My grandfather on my dad’s side served with the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. He was a first-generation Mexican immigrant who never taught his children Spanish because, as my Grandma said, “We were Americans, and we were going to speak the language of America.” They felt their family should fully assimilate into the American culture, and that meant speaking the language of their new homeland. Our family included leaders in the Kansas City Mexican community who pioneered programs that helped assimilate new immigrants into America, as well.
Whenever the national anthem played at my mom’s house (and we watched a lot of sports) you could hear a pin drop. But as beloved as the flag was, it didn’t fly very often, and as an adult it never flew at my home…until 9/11.
Within days of those attacks I joined many Americans in buying my first American flag. I hung it from the deck of our little two-bedroom condo in Anchorage and admired it from the road – prominent and beautiful. I vowed to myself that the flag should stay there as long as necessary to remind everyone that we were a nation at war, and that brave men and women were putting everything on the line to fight for us.
Two years later, we moved into our first house and it went up promptly. It flew there for almost exactly two more years, one of the only flags visible in that Democrat stronghold known as Airport Heights in Anchorage.
Alaskan weather is hard on flags, especially the cheap made-in-China ones that were rushed into production on September 13, 2001. The stripes were tearing at the seams and the colors had faded, so I purchased my second flag, careful to look for the Made in USA label this time. My long-haired, liberal neighbor saw me mounting the new one from across the street and sauntered over, as was his custom. It was June 4th, 2004, and the sun was shining as he grinned behind his Ray-Ban sunglasses.
“You’re doing it wrong. It’s supposed to be at the end of the pole,” he joked, pointing to how I was mounting it at half-staff.
“Ronald Reagan died today,” I replied as neighborly as I could.
His smile vanished and he lowered his gaze. This time he spoke quietly. “I didn’t know that.”
We shared a moment of silence as I finished the job. He showed reverence that I appreciated from a guy who I played dueling political signs with whenever elections came around. No doubt he voted for Reagan, and probably twice – as almost everyone did.
In 2007 we moved again, and so did that second flag. The flags were more numerous in conservative Wasilla but only came out at certain times of the year. Ours flew consistently, which meant that it eventually had to be replaced because, Alaska.
Alaska has some of the most severe weather in the United States, with hurricane force winds a common occurrence several times a year and almost always in February and March. One morning during a fierce windstorm I found the flag pole bent downward below the light, the colors touching the icy driveway. Another time the weather bent the pole 90 degrees to the side.
When a windstorm tore the bracket from the siding, we replaced it but eventually my oldest son and I acknowledged the reality that the weather was winning this battle. Soon afterward, whenever we went into batten down the hatches mode – walking the perimeter of the house and securing anything that might freeze or become an airborne threat to the neighborhood – we would also take down the flag.
“Strike the colors, Dad?” he’d ask.
“Yeah, go ahead.” I’d sigh reluctantly, surrendering to the Alaskan winter but vowing to return.
He was careful never to let it touch the ground and we’d place it in the garage until the weather permitted hoisting it again. Unfortunately, life got in the way. And perhaps owing to laziness or forgetfulness that flag wouldn’t emerge until Memorial Day, because we tend to forget when we are a nation at war, with men and women putting everything on the line to fight for us.
We replaced it with flag number three, and other flags showed up as well, like the one handed to my daughter during an Independence Day parade. When I later found it discarded in a toy pile, I picked it up and set it in a cup with pencils and drill bits, the most reverent place I could find for it at the time. But it, too, had its moment in the sun, or rather, in my newly adopted daughter’s hand as our airplane descended home from Eastern Europe. We named her after a former President – a president who perhaps did more than anyone in history to free her birth nation from Socialist tyranny, and is still one of the few Presidents I believe is worth lowering my flag to half-staff for. Pride swelled within me the exact moment the airplane touched down on U.S. soil, cementing her and her brother’s American citizenship. That little flag, number four, now sits on my desk within the reglued pieces of my erstwhile favorite mug. It’s handcrafted Bulgarian pottery was one of the only souvenirs I brought home along with them.
In January 2018 we moved to a house on a bluff, the highest spot in the neighborhood and the most battered by the weather. With ISIS defeated and Afghanistan all but forgotten by the media and most Americans, mounting the flag in the dead of winter seemed a low priority. When Memorial Day came around, I searched out a good location but realized we left the old bracket at the old house (one doesn’t remove flag brackets from the outside of houses in January in Alaska) and we forgot to buy a new one.
We had been a nation at war for almost my entire adult life. But it felt like we were finally experiencing a peacetime posture, and I surmised it would be okay to hold off hoisting it again. Peace has a way of distracting us. I no longer felt an urgency to remind my neighbors, my children, or myself that America was something we needed to fight for 24/7, but much like that September day nineteen years earlier, that idea of a nation at peace was shattered on November 3rd, 2020.
I needn’t tell you what happened that day, but suffice it to say we became a nation at war again, and my ragged old flag number three, faded and torn in spots, went up again. I watched it flap in the cold winds of January when liars spewed their fallacy of insurrection against people gathered to stand for liberty. I watched it get caked with ice off the roof as institutions created to protect that liberty did everything in their power to subvert it. I’d see that flag from our library window and pray for my country while the media gatekeepers, and a sizable – but by no means a majority – number of Americans yawned as new atrocities against America were revealed by the men and women putting everything on the line to fight for us.
Our flag will stay up, wind or no wind, until the enemies of America are pulled from the houses they’ve desecrated by their usurpation of power and put in their rightful place by God or by man. We are a nation at war, with enemies of everything America stands for sitting fraudulently in vaulted positions they neither earned nor respect.
I don’t know how long that will be. I’ve spoken with more than a few friends who joke about forging a new nation – the United Gulf States of America – if those sworn to defend the Constitution continue to defecate on it. I usually reply that Alaska might just decide to declare itself an independent republic, and we’d be happy to negotiate an alliance.
I removed that faded old flag, carefully folded it, and placed it alongside its predecessors that I still haven’t parted with. I know they’re supposed to be ceremonially retired but I kind of enjoy looking at them from time to time, just like I enjoy gazing at the folded flag near my bookshelf, sitting quietly within a glass case on the wall. That fifth flag once draped my grandfather’s casket, a man who understood that fighting for America isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
This weekend I admired the sixth flag, proudly flapping with the light green leaves of spring as a backdrop. I don’t know how long it will fly there – probably for a long time, even if we’re blessed with sudden victory over America’s latest enemies, foreign and domestic. Perhaps it will take longer to undo the damage they continue to inflict, but God can set things right in a single day and that is what we prayerfully expect.
Until that day, I will continue to fly the stars and stripes to remind everyone that we are a nation at war, with men and women putting everything on the line (careers, reputations, and their lives) to fight for us, even as their own countrymen mock them, cancel them, stab them in the back, or worse, forget that they’re even there.
Perhaps America will cease to exist except as a fraternity member of civilizations that had a good run for a while. Maybe that flag will be replaced by a blue flag with seven gold stars of a new Alaskan republic…but only if those tasked with defending liberty cannot find their gumption to do so. I pray that will never be case, but I’ve also never seen betrayal of this magnitude. God only knows how this war will end.
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