Happy Memorial Day: Take Down Your Flag

Or even better, leave your flag up but put up a second flag!

[AI generated Memorial Day flag raising ceremony.]

There is a story about a young woman named Yara. Yara worked for the city of Franklin in the clerk’s office. During election season, she worked mainly on elections, and during the rest of the year, other things, including staffing the “input line,” the main telephone interface with the public.

One fine June morning she left her house in a quiet cul-de-sac walking distance from City Hall. It was actually her parent’s house; she was living with them until she saved up enough money to move to the Boston area, where she had deferred admission to a graduate program in public policy. Her passion was to work for the government, because she believed public service to be her calling, and she believed in good government. This was something she picked up from her grandfather, who had been a civil servant in Iran; he was an honest government worker, who believed in the elusive concept of democracy. Thus his removal to the United States decades earlier.

Anyway, Yara headed out towards work and as she passed by two side-by-side homes near the corner, the shuddered a bit, thinking about the occupants. They were known to her as MAGA people. One of the residents, a man in his 50s, had one time let himself into Yara’s home while the family was eating dinner, to tell them what the #BLM sign they had just put out on their lawn really means. About how it was racist, and all lives actually matter. And so on.

Yara’s entire family was in some degree of shock as he went on and on about equality vs equity and woke vs sensible, but Yara’s mom remained sufficiently calm and level headed to use a break in his tirade to ask him one simple question. “Are you done, sir?” To which he responded, after a brief pause. “Ah, yes, I am,” after which he promptly exited the house. Yara’s family kept the front door locked after that.

Both of these homes had some MAGA symbology, notably large American flags flying from the porches, and MAGA stickers on the mailboxes on the streetside. Notably, they were the only American flags on display year round in the neighborhood.

When Yara got to City Hall that day, she found an unexpected situation. There was a police car parked right in front, not in the usual parking spot for the police cruiser, but half on the sidewalk in front of the main steps. Two police officers were milling around near the entrance of the brownstone building. As she approached, she noticed three pickup trucks in a row coming up the street, each festooned with makeshift flag poles sporting enormous “TRUMP” flags and American flags. As the trucks drove past the front of City Hall, the drivers leaned on their horns. The passenger in one of the trucks had thrust her hand out the window, displaying her middle finger in the direction of the building.

As Yara gained the steps of the building, two more similar trucks drove by, making similar use of flag and finger to express an as yet unlabeled outrage.

“What’s going on,” she asked one of the cops, officer Billy Montgomery, with whom she was comfortable, having met him several times given that the police station was in the back of the City Hall.

“They’re upset, the Trumpers,” he responded. “The city council met last night. I guess they removed the Pledge of Allegiance from the agenda, and word of that got out. Well, it’s a public meeting, I guess, so that’s how the word got out.”

“Yeah, I knew they were going to do that.” Yara said. “They were just cleaning up the agenda template. It hasn’t been updated in years. They still say the pledge, they will just do it on the opening day of the session, and at the same time, have a flag ceremony organized by the VFW.”

“Yeah, I knew that. My dad was in the Marines. He’s with the color guard. He’ll be one of the guys in the ceremony.”

Three more MAGA trucks drove by. At this point it had become apparent that the MAGAS has about a dozen trucks, all with giant flags, most with passengers in the cab or back of the truck who screamed slurs and insults at the City Hall as they drove by, repeatedly circling the block.

By this time the second cop had wandered over. “The thinking,” Yara, who had typed up the agenda for the previous night’s meeting, and who had been in the room when the change was proposed, continued, “is that saying the pledge every meeting had become rote and meaningless. Plus this year they got a new flag, a nice one with gold fringe and stuff. So they wanted to start the next session with the ceremony, then have the ceremony every cycle, to make it more meaningful. The pledge thing is one of a handful of adjustments they made to the agenda to shorten the meetings. The number one citizen complaint right now, for those that go to the meetings, is that they are too long. That, and potholes, of course.”

All three got a chuckle out of the pothole joke. Four more MAGA trucks drove by, more screaming and middle fingers. Both cops were vets, and both members of the VFW. “So far I’ve not recognized any of them,” noted Billy. “Me neither,” added Quincy, the other cop. “Never saw them at the VFW post, anyway.”

That week it was Yara’s turn to be the main phone answerer. Normally this meant that every now and then the phone would ring, and the city staffer in charge of the phones would address the caller’s questions or route them to where they needed to be. On this day, the phone was already ringing but being handled by the automatic system. Yara sat at her desk, punched in the code to override the automatic answering service, and in just a few seconds there was a new call.

It was a death threat. If you don’t put the pledge of allegiance back on the agenda, you’re dead. Yara thanked the person for their comment and logged the call. There was another call right away, and as Yara logged into her account on her computer, she took that second call, which was also a death threat but with different language. When Yara’s email program came up, with the city clerk’s overnight inbox, it had over 200 emails, which was a lot. (Usually there would be a couple of dozen, since most emails went to specific departments.) Most of them were hate emails, and many were from the same half dozen or so people.

The third phone call was not a death threat. It was a rape threat. This call came through as Yara watched more emails popped up in the inbox, all profane complaints about the pledge being removed from the agenda.

By the end of the day, Yara had logged hundreds of threatening phone calls and emails. She got no other work done. Five or six people had stopped by City Hall to do business they would normally have done on the phone, but couldn’t. “I need this permit issue addressed as soon as I can, normally that would be a phone call, but your phone line seems to be down,” one citizen complained. MAGA had effectively shut down business at this small, already understaffed municipal enterprise.

The next day, it happened again. Then the next day. And the next. This continued until Friday, when the Mayor held a press conference to announce that the Pledge of Allegiance had been put back into the agenda template. The opening day flag ceremony was cancelled, and everything went back to the way it was, with the meaningless rote pledge said at the start of every meeting. Note: The staff reckoned that none of the protestors that they saw outside the building had ever been to a city council meeting, and never showed up to one later. The police did take down license plates, and they reckoned in the end that only one of the two or three dozen vehicles involved in the protest were registered in the city. The MAGA protestors who had circled the building for five days were from somewhere else, a more conservative part of the state out beyond the suburbs.

Every night for five days, when Yara went home, she walked past those two MAGA homes, on the corner of her street. On Wednesday, both of the flags they had faithfully flown were gone, and replaced by newer, much larger flags. She assumed they were acting in solidarity with the aggrieved pledge-pushers from out of town. She thought, how sad it is that my family can’t have a #BLM sign without being harassed, and she considered the idea that they get a big American flag to put out front just to show them.

But then she realized that this was not necessarily the best idea. Yara was not the only child of non-Christian immigrants on this very street, and there were three African American families nearby. MAGA was white, white supremacist, racist, anti-immigrant, and a threat. If she shuddered every time she walked by MAGA, signified by their American Flags, how would those other people feel walking by her house if there was an American flag flying there?

Two weeks later, Yara came home to an unpleasant surprise. As she turned the corner to walk down her street, she could see that there was one more home with an American Flag prominently displayed. As she got closer, she confirmed: It was her own home! At first she was frightened. The most logical explanation for this flag is that one of her MAGA neighbors had put it there, had tagged them, as an act of symbolic … whatever. She was confused. But then it occurred to her, what had really happened.

“Dad, why did you put that flag outside?!?”

“To show that we are real Americans, just as real as the rest of them.”

“But MAGA flies this flag, Dad, don’t you understand? Did you forget already what happened at City Hall?”

“Yes, and that is why we have the flag! We are taking back the flag! It isn’t just MAGAs flag, it is everybody’s flag!”

“But dad, that’s fine, but flying the flag right now, on this day, means MAGA. I had to answer the phone all week at work, dad. Do you know how many calls I got threatened me with death? Or were rape threats?” Yara had never told her parents about the phone calls.

“They were what? That is not the American way. But that is why we have to take back the flag!”

This discussion went on for a while. Yara reminded her dad that last year when he was canvassing in support of a Democratic Party candidate, he avoided the homes with American flags hanging on them, or American flag stickers on the mailbox, knowing that they were likely MAGA.

“You told me those people might even hurt you, set their dogs on you, remember that?”

In the end, Yara’s mom solved the conflict. She went on Amazon and ordered for overnight delivery two more flags, and the poles needed to mount them on the front porch.

“There, that solves the problem,” Yara’s mom said, as she handed her faithful husband his drill and the hardware to mount the flags, and Yara, nearby, stood watch with a broad smile on her face. Her mom is cool, she was thinking.

“Yes, this is a good solution, I admit,” he said. “And I fully support it. Also, we support diversity, even though no one in our house is gay.”

“Um dad,” Yara said. “After you put up the flags, we should talk.”

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Note: The above story is fiction. However, it is based closely on actual events that occurred in the Twin Cities a couple of years ago. The salient true facts are:

• A small city’s council changed the agenda template to exclude the pledge.

• MAGA from elsewhere circled city hall in flag festooned Fords for days.

• The city backed down.

• A young woman who was destined for a career in civil service had to log the rape and death threats for several days.

• When people don’t know what is in a home, an American flag reliably signals right wingers, even though there are some homes where this is a false signal. The trauma is still felt.

• In the same part of town, but on a different occasion, a MAGA man entered uninvited the home of a person of color who had put out a #BLM sign to tell her why that was wrong.