{"id":60334,"date":"2015-06-29T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60334"},"modified":"2015-06-27T16:44:43","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T15:44:43","slug":"lower-the-us-flag-on-the-4th-of-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/lower-the-us-flag-on-the-4th-of-july\/","title":{"rendered":"Lower the US Flag on the 4th of July!"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Or: I\u2019ll Take Down My Flag when You Take Down Yours!)<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve marched in the Civil Rights Movement. During the Vietnam War, I marched behind a Peace Symbol flag, and just happened to be in the flashbulb\u2019s light when the Boston Globe<\/em> reporter snapped his Cannon. My picture made it to the newspaper\u2019s front page, which a war-supporting high-school administrator posted on the bulletin board in the faculty cafeteria with the caption: \u201cIs this really the kind of character we want teaching our kids?\u201d Some fellow anti-war faculty nodded surreptitious approval at me, but even more simply glowered.\u00a0\u00a0 (I couldn\u2019t understand why\u2026. It wasn\u2019t a terrible<\/em> picture\u2014even though I hadn\u2019t smiled!) It was that kind of time\u2026.<\/p>\n

For over half a century, I’ve written articles against racism and war. I was shocked and I grieved to see what happened at the Charleston Emanuel Church. Quickly, the call went out: We need to have a \u201cconversation\u201d about race in America! And, almost as quickly: Take down the Confederate flag! But, let’s be very clear: the Confederate flag is NOT a central issue here.<\/p>\n

Sometime later, at that very white, upper-middle class Boston suburban high-school where my picture had nefariously been bulletin-boarded, my advanced English students were complaining about \u201call this symbolism stuff\u201d that showed up in Shirley Jackson\u2019s dramas, Dickens\u2019 novels or Hemingway\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

With Bogart cool, I didn\u2019t say a word: I chalked the heart-symbol on the blackboard. Next to it, I drew a Christian crucifix; and then a five-pointed star; and then a Star of David. I juxtaposed the quarter moon and star of Islam, and then the Yin-Yang symbol of Taoism. And then the Buddhist swastika, and then the reversed Nazi swastika. I asked my students to identify these symbols and to explain why some were important to them and some were not.<\/p>\n

It would be a much more pleasant world if we all understood symbols in the same way! (Even at their tender age, no one did.)<\/p>\n

I told them about a teacher in another part of the state. She had also tried to teach a lesson about symbolism. She had dared any kid in her high-school English kid to take down the American flag in the classroom\u2014and step on it.<\/p>\n

Of course, there\u2019s always at least one adolescent in any group who will take a dare! That teacher lost her job, and probably her career, for her bodacious demonstration of this entangled matter.<\/p>\n

Symbolism is always important, but the Confederate flag is maligned if it is merely reduced to an historical oddity\u2014 a symbol of American racism; something to put behind us. Let us be very careful here! Any attempt to drive that flag underground will only succeed in making it a more potent symbol of resistance. Resistance to the Federal Government, the consolidation of power, etc.<\/p>\n

Coming from a mixed religious background, an olive-skinned \u201cCaucasian\u201d (yeah, my school records indicated that), being especially fond of Asian women, and with great respect for enlightened souls of all creeds and backgrounds, I don\u2019t \u201crank\u201d people according to their appearance\u2014 nor their family history.<\/p>\n

But, I do try very hard to know the real history, the oft-hidden history, of my own country and other countries\u2014 those countries still palpitating among us and those long-gone in the faintly-resounding well of Time.<\/p>\n

Books like Dee Brown\u2019s \u201cBury My Heart at Wounded Knee,\u201d which I read in my 20s, cast a cold, hard light on America\u2019s wars against its Original Peoples. Authors like Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin helped me understand the racial struggle for dignity. \u201cThe Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson\u201d enlightened me about that top-notch \u201chero\u201d with muddy boots. The books in Howard Zinn\u2019s \u201cPeople\u2019s History\u201d series continue to inspire me to probe further. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick\u2019s 10-hour series, \u201cThe Untold History of the United States\u201d should be watched again and again!<\/p>\n

Our Civil War was not about “liberating slaves”–and most Southerners know that. \u00a0Would there have been draft riots in New York if there were popular sentiment in the North for the liberation of Southern slaves? Would some 50,000 \u201cYankees\u201d\u2014mostly recently-arrived Irish immigrants, have shown their defiance of Lincoln\u2019s draft, lynched about 100 Blacks if there had been such a hunger to \u201cliberate\u201d slaves in the South? (If only they had $300\u2014a huge sum then\u2014they could have bought their way out of the draft, as richer, more established Americans had done\u2014in the Revolutionary War and in the \u201cCivil War.\u201d (Let\u2019s recall that it is called \u201cThe War of Northern Aggression\u201d in the South. Southerners felt they had a Constitutional right to secede! Frankly, I agree. And, if there had been no \u201cCivil War,\u201d the \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d of slavery would have outlived its usefulness much sooner than the apartheid-segregation that replaced it!)<\/p>\n

The slave-trade had been very profitable to the North and South for several decades. When the North began to industrialize, its need for cheap labor became paramount. Might such \u201ccheap labor\u201d be found in the South\u2014among \u201cliberated\u201d slaves?<\/p>\n

Also, there was that huge territory recently conquered from the new Republic of Mexico! What to do with it (mostly occupied by \u201credskins\u201d or \u201csavages\u201d as Jefferson had designated them in The Declaration of \u201cIndependence\u201d\u2014and as Lincoln must have agreed when, as a young man, he fought them in the \u201cBlackhawk War,\u201d and, later, during his Presidency, had 39 of them hanged, when they tried to escape their prison-reservation.)<\/p>\n

Who would control that territory? Northern industrialists? Northern railroad men (and railroad lawyers like Lincoln)? Northern banks?<\/p>\n

Frankly, I have no love of the Confederate flag; but, just as frankly, I have no love of the American flag\u2026. (Yet, from the age of 5, I was compelled to stand and \u201cpledge allegiance\u201d to that flag. I had no idea, of course, what \u201cpledging\u201d or \u201callegiance\u201d meant then!) On the 4th<\/sup> of July, when Americans raise their flags as a proud symbol of their \u201cfreedom,\u201d will anyone dare to lower their flags to half-mast to commemorate the 60,000 Americans who died in a now-acknowledged \u201cunnecessary\u201d war in Vietnam– let alone the millions of Asians? Would it be disrespectful even to suggest such a gesture?<\/p>\n

I think our “issues,” now boiling over in many ways, are even more deep-rooted in the human psyche than white-black distrust and antagonism: xenophobia; fear of the Other; fear of oneself and the Unknown.<\/p>\n

These various fears have divided us since our colonial times–when we hanged “witches” in Salem; or invited Pequot “Indians” to be our “guests” at a harvest festival, then locked them in a building and burned hundreds of them alive!<\/p>\n

Was it the huge, dangerous “frontier” that generated such fearfulness? Was it the oceanic separation from the “Mother Country”? Was it the ever increasing disparities between indentured servants, the working classes, the super-elite?<\/p>\n

We need to do a lot more searching, a lot deeper digging, if we’re going to root out and destroy the virus that has been killing us for centuries!<\/p>\n

Soon after I had joined the faculty at that suburban Boston high school, \u201cbussing\u201d programs were introduced\u2014 notwithstanding the strident opposition of anti-bussing groups. My extra-curricular contribution was an interracial \u201cBlack and White Club\u201d where students could meet and share their experiences, get to know each other. We read \u201cSoul on Ice\u201d by Eldridge Cleaver, and poems by Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay.<\/p>\n

Express, recognize, define, explain, re-define, refine, listen and learn\u2026, and we can respect other people\u2019s symbols for what they are: waystations on a long and winding road to a transcendent, global awareness.<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

Gary Corseri has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library, and his dramas have been produced on <\/em>PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He has published novels and collections of poetry, has taught in US public schools and prisons, and in US and Japanese universities. His work has appeared at <\/em>Transcend Media Service<\/a>, Village Voice, The New York Times and hundreds of publications and websites worldwide. Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For over half a century, I’ve written articles against racism and war. I was shocked and I grieved to see what happened at the Charleston Emanuel Church. Quickly, the call went out: Take down the Confederate flag! But, let’s be very clear: the Confederate flag is NOT a central issue here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}