How Do You Burn an Abstraction?

What I think of first when I see the flag is the thirty guys I served with in Vietnam who came home in plastic bags, delivered whole or in fragments to families.

When I was a kid, we started every day in school by pledging our allegiance to the flag. “And to the republic for which it stands,” we’d say next, as if the sequence suggested that maybe the flag was more important than what it stood for. Judging from the way many Americans behave these days, that’s the way is.

When Colin Kaepernick took a knee for the first time during the playing of the nation l anthem in 2016, it wasn’t the flag he was protesting. The same was true of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who stood on the podium with heads bowed and fists raised while the national anthem played after they received their medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Kaepernick explained that he would not honor the flag of a country that discriminated against its minorities both in law and in practice. Smith and Carlos offered the same justification fifty years earlier, as have many other athletes refusing to participate in flag ceremonies—Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, Megan Rapinoe, LeBron James, Gwen Berry—it’s a long list, and it’s not the flag they’re protesting. It’s the policies and practices of the republic for which it stands.

On August 25, 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order to prohibit flag burning, despite a Supreme Court decision establishing that the act is a form of speech and is therefore protected by the first amendment. According to his order, “Our great American Flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and of American freedom, identity, and strength.” Despite the florid and grandiose language, I think the key word here is “symbol,” for that is what the flag is, and as we know, symbols are abstractions.

People looking at the flag find their own meanings in it. That’s how it works with abstractions. As we learned in school, the flag itself is only a collage of red, white, and blue cloth, sewn together in a pattern chosen by its designers to represent the original thirteen colonies and the current fifty states. It’s a whole cloth of abstractions. Burning it may destroy the cloth, but the flames have no effect on anything the flag represents. The values the president wants to protect remain in force regardless of what happens to the flag.

They’re threatened only by people who contradict them in thought, word, and deed.

True, many see the same American freedom, identity, and strength the president celebrates. No doubt even many of the country’s indigenous peoples find the same meanings the president wants to protect, but many of them also see dispossession, displacement, and destruction. This is the flag that waved over the wholesale slaughter and mutilation of their ancestors at places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the flag that waved over the troops herding the survivors onto reservations.

Many immigrants likewise find those meanings in the flag. That’s why they left their native places and came here. They wanted what they thought we had. And many of them also remember that they left those places to escape the wreckage and chaos werought by American troops as they waged wars of choice in the name of that same freedom, identity, and strength. They remember their own Sand Creeks and Wounded Knees in countries like the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

What I think of first when I see the flag is the thirty guys I served with in Vietnam who came home in plastic bags, delivered whole or in fragments to families broken by loss and grief, families that still wonder what their sons and daughters died for, what change in the world came about as a result of their deaths. When the national anthem plays before the game, I leave the room if I can. If not, I bow my head and remember those thirty guys.

I have no wish to disturb the reveries of my neighbors by taking a knee or indulging in any other form of conspicuous protest. But like Smith, Carlos, Kaepernick, and all those others who refused to honor the flag of a country tht treats its minorities as a problem to be solved, I have no wish to honor the flag of a country in whose service thirty good men died to no purpose whatsoever. That’s what the flag means to me—the squandered lives and deaths of guys who were my friends, guys the president dismisses as suckers and losers.

If the president wants cherished symbols of American freedom, identity, and strength, he might do better to focus on the six thousand graves at Gettysburg, the two hundred and sxty thousand graves at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, the four hundred thousand graves at Arlington National Cemetery. He might walk down the Mall and spend some time at the memorials to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, facing each other in front of the Lincoln Memorial—the walls of stone where the names of those thirty guys and a hundred thousand others are inscribed.

And if he wants sacred symbols, he probably ought to start with the National Cathedral, and go on to the quarter million churches, synagogues, and mosques scattered across the country, where the faithful gather to reaffirm their commitment to the gods of their scriptures, and to the values the president thinks are endangered by people who don’t see the flag as he does.

Instead of celebrating the flag, I prefer to celebrate the courage of Americans like Jay Carey, a decorated veteran who burned a flag in front of the White House to challenge the president’s executive order. Carey likely was aware that both the flag and his act were abstractions symbolizing the freedom of expression secured by the first amendment. Carey’s act honors American freedom, identity, and strength, bypublicly demonstrating his defiance of a president who honors none of those things.