Whose Flag?

On August 26, 2025, Jay Carey, a 20-year Army veteran burned a flag in Lafayette Park in response to Trump declaring flag burning illegal with a one-year sentence. The Secret Service arrested him. A version of the article below appeared in the spring 2023 edition of Peace & Planet News.

Honor the Flag

We moved to a small city, bought a big house on a street lined with maples and sycamores. Two blocks away are the County Court House and City Hall, both historic landmarks. They face each other across Main Street beside tracks where slow-moving freights roll through. Bells at City Hall and three nearby churches toll the hour.

Beyond the tracks, Main Street goes gradually downhill for 12 blocks, lined with old brick buildings. Most of them were built in the 1880s. Their storefronts offer coffee shops, restaurants, boutiques, law offices, bars, a music store, shoe store, men’s clothing store, appliance store, bookstore, banks, ski emporium, hotel, furniture store, microbrewery, and fudge shop. At the bottom of Main Street is a 16-mile-long freshwater lake.

Around all of this are dairy farms and rolling cornfields, creeks and streams, wooded hills, and glens with waterfalls. In the winter there is snow and ice, in the summer the weather is warm. Sometimes thunderstorms rumble through.

But this is the 21st century, so one road that leads into town is lined with car dealers and car washes and strip malls, and another road is lined with big box stores and mammoth supermarkets and ubiquitous fast-food drive-thrus. It’s puzzling that the city planners and voters permitted these roads into this pleasant place to be lined by acres of parking lots and architecturally wanton buildings of no congruity.

Puzzling as I might find this to be, what puzzles me more is the preponderance of American flags. They drape from light poles, storefronts, porches, the sides of barns. In the parking lot of a boat retailer is a tall pole with a flag so massive that when the wind blows the flag appears to flap in slow motion. Small flags, the size waved during parades are stuck in the ground beside gravestones. Home sidewalks are lined with them. Do we need to be told we’re in the United States? Apparently the people who fly the flag think we do. Or are they saying they are more American than people who don’t fly the flag? And when the opportunity comes along, grumble about people like my buddy Tarak, an Army paratrooper veteran who says the stars and stripes all over the world are a symbol of everything bad our country does in the name of Wall Street and arms manufacturers. Tarak has spent his life working toward a peaceful world, yet people grumble about men like Tarak. They say he hates America and should get the hell out of the land of the free before he’s thrown out.

Yesterday I saw a guy driving one of those high-wheeled pickup trucks. Flapping from a PVC pipe jammed onto a trailer hitch was an enormous Old Glory. More peculiar, I think, is the number of flags around town that signify in which branch of the military the homeowner spent time in uniform. On either side of me and across the street, and for a string of four houses along the other side, the American flag is flown. But next door to me an Army flag also flies, and across the street is a Navy flag. I’ve seen Air Force flags and a Coast Guard flag. To me all of it looks like boasting. The Marine Corps flag is the most common in this little city. That seems preposterously disproportionate. The Marine Corps has the fewest members of any military branch yet considerably more local homes display that flag. Might the flown flag be an example of stolen valor? I’ve been tempted to knock on a door and ask if the guy is really a former Marine but that doesn’t sound like it offers an inkling of reasonable outcome. I find no reason to cheer my time in the Air Force where I spent my entire four years working on targets.

Before I knew what the two words “pledge allegiance” meant, they were in my vocabulary. We started every school day standing beside our desks with right hand on our breast, swearing loyalty to an indivisible nation through the adoration of a piece of cloth. We were Americans. We were not Canadians or anything else. Lines on a map and the flag said we were not. If it came down to it, we would be told to give our lives to protect those map lines and that flag. I grew up by Lake Ontario and sometimes I’ve joked about the trauma of a childhood under the constant threat of an amphibious invasion from the nation to the north. Sometimes people don’t know I’m joking.

Old Glory, though. Anyone can fly her, just like anyone can claim to be patriotic. All that’s required to be a patriot is to say you love your country, and you’re all set. You don’t have to do a thing more except possibly fly a flag. The flag that had always signified we all are one but now signifies we’re not.