The Fallen Flag

R.M. Hamilton

“You must never let an American flag touch the ground,” an American teenage boy informed me gloomily. “If an American flag touches the ground, it must be burnt.”

I was only a teenager myself and I had been in America for a grand total of four days.

Looking back, it was probably a bad idea to take cultural advice from a teenage boy. But I was eager to fit in and give no offense. I made a mental note to avoid handling American flags at all.

But even at seventeen, something about this belief didn’t seem quite right. It bothered me, at the back of my head, even as I carefully avoided all situations that could result in me inadvertently treating the Stars and Stripes with disrespect.

Why would anyone burn a flag, just because it had fallen to the ground? Why couldn’t you just pick it up and run it back up its pole? I wondered.

As I began to read American history books, this boy’s advice about burning American flags seemed even stranger.

The White House has caught fire three times so far. And nobody said, “oh well, how sad. It was nice while it lasted.”

They rebuilt it.

And nowhere, anywhere, did it seem to occur to anyone to not rebuild it.

And what about the Pilgrims and the Strangers who faced a long and horrible journey across the Atlantic, just to arrive at the wrong time of year and plunge into a time of starvation, plague and death?

Why didn’t they just pack up, turn around and go home.

The Pilgrims could have said, “Oh well, we tried to worship God according to our conscience and it didn’t work. We’ll go back and knuckle down under the king.”

And the Strangers could have said, “we wanted to improve our lives and get rich, but this is just too hard. We’ll just go home to England and whatever will be will be.”

But they didn’t.

They stayed.

Somehow, these sorts of stories didn’t really fit with the idea that ‘once an American flag has touched the ground it must be burnt’.

What about General Washington in charge of America’s first army? The reenactors of today look picturesque marching in a 4th of July parade to the merry sounds of fife and drum, but the original continental army was underfunded, hounded by General Cornwallis, plagued by  influenza, typhus, typhoid and dysentery and reduced to eating rats to survive at Valley Forge.

If ever America hit the mud, she hit it at Valley Forge.

I could go on and on about this subject. I could talk about America desperately trying to be taken seriously as a country after the revolution, with her underfunded embassies.

I could talk about the war of 1812, where you got your national anthem.

I could talk about the Civil War, the Great Depression, the World Wars and all the stuff in between and after.

But I won’t. It’s your history, after all. It’s your story. You are the stars of the novel that sways forever between the white stripes of victory and the red bars of struggle.

You don’t need a New Zealander from the bottom of the world to tell you what you are.  

That American teenage boy was well intentioned. But he was wrong. I finally had the bright idea of researching his claim.

That’ll be the last time I listen to a fifteen-year-old.

One ignorant kid giving another ignorant kid wrong advice is kind of cute.

What’s not kind of cute are the full-grown adults in certain parts of the world who are currently throwing the American flag on the ground deliberately, so they can burn it.

They’re yelling “death to America” as they do it, like it’s some kind of ritual.

 They’re yelling other really evil things too, but there’s only so much evil I can stand to quote in one essay.

They throw your flag down in the desperate hope that the act is a symbol of your nation falling forever.

They scream “death to America” like it’s an incantation, imbued with dark magical powers.

And once your flag has fallen to the ground, they light it on fire, hoping that one day, you’ll burn too.

I guess no one ever told them, the ground is the perfect place to start praying.

And apparently, they haven’t read about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being delivered from the fiery furnace.

What was it that rotten old King Nebuchadnezzar said as he looked into the flames? “Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire?” They replied, “Certainly, Your Majesty.” He said, “Look! I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.” Daniel 3:24-25

Which is all to say, even when your flag does hit the ground, and even if someone does douse it with gas and light it on fire, you can still be delivered.

It might take a miracle. But you’ve had miracles before.

If your flag is in the mud, don’t assume everything is going up in flames.

Get down on your knees.

Ask God to pick up your nation.

He’s done it before.

He’ll do it again.