God, Flag, and Country

Last year at this time, I was walking down a Main Street parade route at the Magic Kingdom hoisting a gigantic American flag with some 200 other people who had attained the stringent requirement of owning a pair of white sneakers and checking in anywhere over 5”3.

“Wear sunblock,” a co-worker warned me. “That flag isn’t going to protect you much.”

O irony! O symbolism! Beneath her words, was she telling me that my political ideals, strong as they were, could never shield me from strife and pain…. or did she mean that patriotism was blinding me from the problems of my country…. or was she implying that we as a nation were hiding behind America’s greatest accomplishments, resting on our laurels when we should be striving forward?

Or perhaps she was merely saying: You are the whitest woman I have ever met; perhaps the palest person in the universe, and without a minimum SPF of 4128 you are going to fry your ass.

I think we are ready for the Fourth again, peering cautiously around the looming terror of 9/11 and prepared to simply let summer be in all its lemonade and bottle rockets. We are weary; we have been torn and bleeding and are just now checking beneath the bandages to find that the scars aren’t so crimson anymore. Battles over affirmative action, gay marriage and abortion loom, along with another election year (already?), but for now, I think, Americans just want to… be.

Most people with a conscience or the merest glimmer of spirituality have gained a new appreciation for normal life over the past two years. We drive to work in a traffic jam and think, “Isn’t it wonderful that I have a job.” We inhale, feel the strong breath and not the shaking gasps of fear. We automatically slip off our shoes in the airport security line, delayed but not disgruntled. We hurry to pull out of the way for a wailing fire truck, less annoyed, more grateful.

Go ahead and hoist a corn on the cob on me this weekend. Make the cold beer your own and leave the fretting for another day. Inhale. Rest; for sometimes a gigantic American flag is merely a gigantic American flag.