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I have been troubled by the flag controversies. It's a trouble that won't go away. I try to let it recede, watch for the tide to go out, for other topics to come in on the next wave. They always do. Except for this time the wave keeps tossing this one back on the shores of my mind.
I don't want to be simply reactionary regardless of my passions. I feel from Facebook posts, news, articles, blogs and a variety of media that it has all been said. But apparently not because I haven't said my piece. And the unction won't go away.
I grew up in the deep south where I still officially reside. The deep south is a combination of states. Sometimes I've thought of it as a state of mind. As a young woman who lived in other states and places far away from the south as I always equated that state of mind with love, family, the good dirt of my childhood. A wave of homesickness found me on regular occasions. The song Blue Bayou could bring me to tears. And, don't stop reading here, the Confederate flag could touch my heart in a wistful kind of way.
The wistful was not for the Jim Crow south. It was not for years of repression, for prejudice, for segregation or for violence. It was me simply growing up with a heart that held Dixie dear. Dixie for me was home. It was my grandmothers on southern porches. It was sweet tea and chocolate cakes. It was firefly nights in a yard full of cousins. Laughter, storytelling, love. In those homesick moments that flag simply represented that.
Now, I am no longer young and wistful. I have lived through the segregation of schools where some people wore the armor of defiance to school the first day, ready to pick a fight, daring someone to challenge them. For a few days, I was a white girl. Those days passed. Without incident. I made lifelong friends. I was fortunate to be raised by parents who didn't poison me with prejudice. But that also made me ignorant of some things. Living in a bubble of we all get along. There was the absence of malice in my heart. But I grew up and learned that the flag that sometimes represented home to me represented absolute terror and a ruptured history to others. Those others are my friends. What matters to friends matters to me.
The deep south. It means different things to different people based on their experiences or what the media is either revealing or shading. It's hard for me to ever find a southern show or movie that doesn't turn southern characters into caricatures. We're as complicated and intelligent here as the rest of the world. And, just like the rest of the world, there are some dark evils and mindsets I cannot comprehend.
I watched as the ruckus broke out over the Confederate flag and statues. Items belonging in historical museums certainly. Were those state rights part of the issue? Yes, like it or not, believe it or not, for some they were. They really were. The people who got pulled into a war who owned nothing. The poor who took up arms and fought to protect what they thought was going to be taken away from them, their freedom. Funny word that. Serious word that. Because historically on both sides of that controversy of the flag and it's history freedom was the one thing everyone could agree on. It's what no one wanted to lose. It's what people would die for trying to obtain. But bottom line - there was a great matter at stake - slavery. An existence where the total absence of freedom was and always will be an everyday reality - not a television show.
Recently, I attended my nephew's middle school football game. Ticket takers sat at a little folding table with a money box. Hot dogs and cokes were being sold at the snack bar. The lights came on as it grew darker on the field. It was the final game of the season and the players walked their mothers out on the field giving each of them a rose. I watched as my sister was walked across the fifty-yard line with this big guy I hardly recognized even though I see him every week. He had on his uniform and I could swear he looked like a full-grown man. My sister looked more than a little proud.
When she walked off the field she joined me to get my mother's bags out of the car. As we were walking the announcer asked that we please all stop what we were doing and have a moment of silence for the victims of the recent hurricanes in Houston and Florida and those living on all the islands. We stopped, the people around us stopped, it felt like the entire world did. The moment stretched into a minute and beyond. Then it reached farther than that. I don't know how long we were silent but I know it was longer than anyone might have expected including me. Maybe three times as long. That silence enveloped that entire field and in it, I hoped that the people so far away down in those islands felt that silence. That they knew a small country town in the middle of Tennessee was recognizing them and their pain, that prayers were being said. Then the announcer finally said now, join us in standing and singing the national anthem and we did.
Then the kneeling or standing for the flag melee erupted. The American flag. That's all old news at this point. But I watched as friends and family began to post things on social media. I stand for the flag. This is about race. It's about the 2nd amendment and so on. Or as someone posted, I've unfriended fifty people today. I've blocked twenty friends. Final straws were cast about. More friendships broken, deleted, washed away. I watched. I thought. I swallowed words. Kept my fingers off the keys. Until now.
My father served in the army for over twenty years. I haven't tuned into Ken Burns documentary yet about Vietnam because my Daddy served there. In sixth grade, I watched the war from my living room wondering if one of the dead soldiers in the footage was him or if he would make it home. I lived with a silent, unspoken dread. It was my life. No wonder that year I wrote what I suppose was my first serious piece. It was a prayer for the soldiers to come home again. It was chosen by my teacher to be read in a chapel at the Episcopal Day School at my home in Panama City. I demanded to remain anonymous which actually angered my teacher. But I knew what I was doing. I didn't want the platitudes about those words. I didn't want someone to compliment me when what I was doing was pouring my heart out with a hope that not only my father would survive but all those other fathers I saw on the nightly news. I was aware.
My Daddy made it home. So very, many fathers did not.
Flash forward for what feels like a thousand years I watched as both my sons joined the military. I stand by helpless as they are both deployed to war zones multiple times.
My sons came home again. So very, many sons did not.
So, my daddy fought to protect those freedoms the American flag represents. My sons fought to protect those freedoms that the flag represents. I would imagine every relative I have stands for the National Anthem. I would imagine if they couldn't stand they'd ask people to pick them off the dirt and stand them up. Yes, I stand and I tear up when we get to the point that we sing, Does that star-spangled banner still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave. Every time. Because I respect the sacrifice of so many for the freedoms that we still possess. But do I throw dirt on those who have knelt in protest of something they perceive as a scar, who try to get attention in prime time for causes that don't affect me personally? In a simple word, no.
This isn't the place to point out the dear friends who have made clear statements about why they understand the football players who knelt during the anthem and about how it represents something that they understand on a personal level. I comprehend intellectually just as I realize what they protest has not been a part of my reality. Many things have been. Being raised by poor grandparents who picked cotton to survive, that's a part of my real world. And, it affects all sorts of things as you grow up. All experiences color our perceptions.
I love my memories of the deep south. The porch rockers and slow talkers and funny storytellers. And on a broader scale, I feel that way about this country. Sea to shining sea and all that. Those old neighborhoods in Brooklyn. That mountaintop in Taos. That green Oregon coast. I'm pretty sold on this country. Still. In spite of the political diatribes that have filled the very air we breathe with as filled strife and anger I still believe that we as Americans are unified by those words: 'We the People.'
I was listening to an interview with an old man in the middle of the Houston flood. He was in a bad way and had suffered greatly. The interview featured two firefighters who had driven all night from California to help those in need. The old man said, "You mean to tell me y'all come all this way." And they said, "Yes, sir. We came to help." And he said, "And you're from California and here we are in Texas," then he choked up and almost couldn't go on but he managed. He said, "In the end, it don't matter what our differences are; we're just all Americans."
That's who we are when we are at our very best. It's why so many people throughout the ages of the history of this country have said, "If we can only get to America," because on the other side of that wish lived some kind of dream.
I don't think it needs to take another catastrophe or major tragedy in this country for us to remember where our strength lies. An insidious evil has tried to tear us apart from the inside out. One blocked, unfriended person at a time. We're better than this. We have to be. The beauty is we still have the freedom to make that choice.
