The Thing About Flags

Okay, so here is the disclaimer: I'm not against flags.  I will stand and say the pledge of allegiance, including the "under God" part.  I would never burn a flag. I even get a little choked up at funerals when the VFW guys do the folding and presentation of the flag to the family of the deceased veteran.  I understand that humans are wired for symbolism at a very deep level, and quite frankly it is because of the power of symbols that I feel like we need to have a talk about flags.
Let's start with the flag du jour, the "stars and bars," the battle flag of the Confederacy, the "Rebel" flag, which is still flown, worn and otherwise honored in much of the South, and on top of orange Dodge Challengers.  Some would tell you it's about being proud of where you come from, that it's about heritage and about holding on to home and family values and church and God, biscuits and sweet tea and fried chicken, and all the good things that make the South the South.  But others would tell you that it's a sign of a people who have never really given up an old grudge.  Maybe they're both right.

At this point in history though the Confederate flag means one thing that is absolutely and positively unavoidable: racism.  I know that the American Civil war was about a lot more than slavery, I have learned at least that much about history.  I know that the form of slavery that existed in the Antebellum era was going to die eventually and that the war was more about state's rights and taxation. I know that the Union was more or less telling the Confederacy that they just needed to pay their taxes and shut up. However, in the annals of history and perhaps more importantly, in the collective consciousness of our nation, the war was about ending the state sanctioned practice of slavery and making sure that we lived up to our creed of "all men" being created equal. That phrase continued to mean land owning white males long after the war was over, and to some extent is still true, but at least in theory we mean "all humans."

The Confederate Flag symbolizes a sort of uber-conservative mindset: leave us alone and let us do things our way, don't change because we like the way things are working out... at least for us and ours.  And so you still find it flying in many places, including South Carolina.

Don't you dare tell me that it's "just" a symbol, people kill and die for symbols all the time.  Symbols infect us in a way that we don't always fully understand.  Poor white people everywhere have been saturated with the notion that things have changed for the worse and those changes account for how crappy the world is for them.  They have been told that, once upon a time, the world was different for the likes of them, back in the good old days, when black folk knew their place and the benevolent white landowners made sure that things didn't fall apart.  Never mind that many of their ancestors were virtual slaves called sharecroppers, who were so poor and hungry that former slaves ended up regretting the emancipation proclamation when they found out how hard it was to feed your family the way the poor whites did.

The Confederacy was an idea that was conceived by and primarily benefited the wealthy landowning class.  They did everything within their power to convince the poor white folk they should buy in, and boy did they ever, and boy will they still buy in today.  They buy in to such an extent that it sort of confounds me on a nearly daily basis.  The Confederate mindset is alive and well in America today, and it has spread out of the South, and it has it's own TV shows and is all over talk radio.

Most white folks will whistle Dixie and view the idea as a sort of charming little cultural wrinkle.  Up until last week, I almost never heard anyone make a fuss about the Confederate flag flying in state capitols or being displayed in thousands of other public spaces.  Until we ask ourselves what it means, what is that symbol about?

Way back in the Hebrew Scriptures, God was always getting super cheesed off about idols.  "Have no other gods before me," it says in the Law of Moses, in fact, "don't even make pictures of other gods, or even of me, or angels or anything," because as soon as you do that you're tiptoeing towards idolatry.  Idols are tricky little blighters to say the least, they sort of sneak up on you.  Sure none of us have probably gone out to altar to Baal or Moloch recently, but I guarantee you we are not innocent of the idolatry thing.  It's because of our innate awareness and use of symbols, we give them power the very moment they start to mean something to us.

As you might imagine, this applies to any symbol, a flag, a swastika, a star of David, a picture of a dead president (money), or even a cross.  And so it behooves us to always consider the meaning of our symbols.  Where do they come from? What do they mean now?  Are our attitudes and allegiances to them consistently subordinate to our devotion to God?  In other words, what is more important: that we display a cross around our neck or in our home, or that we actually do what Jesus told us to do?  Is it more important that we pledge allegiance to the flag or that we truly seek to be a good and righteous nation "under God?"

Are we letting our idols get the better of us?

I'm not suggesting we stop being symbol using creatures, however, I am suggesting that we stop letting our symbols use us.