By Wesley Harris
Friday is Flag Day. It’s one of those observances often overlooked, coming in between Memorial Day and Independence Day, holidays usually accompanied by a brief vacation from work.
But most of us will be working Friday. Even though it is an official national observance, first signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1949, it usually passes by uneventfully.
To me, Flag Day is a big deal. It celebrates more than our national flag but the country the flag represents.
I have toured the Washington, DC museums and monuments many times. Nothing stirs more emotion than the Star Spangled Banner in the National Museum of American History. That flag flew decades after the war for American independence during a conflict to see if the new nation would survive as a free country.
On September 14, 1814, U.S. soldiers at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry raised the huge American flag to celebrate a crucial victory over British forces during the War of 1812. The sight of those “broad stripes and bright stars” inspired Francis Scott Key to write the song that became America’s national anthem. Key’s words gave significance to a national emblem that stirs emotions among those who realize it represents all the sacrifices necessary to ensure our freedoms and way of life endure.
The flag that flew at Fort McHenry is tattered, missing almost a quarter of its length, not because of war damage, but because it was so sacred to Americans that many pieces were cut off and given away as treasured keepsakes.
In his 1915 Flag Day address, President Woodrow Wilson said, “For me the flag does not express a mere body vague of sentiment. The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of sentiment but of a history, and no man can rightly serve under that flag who has not caught some of the meaning of that history. Experience, ladies and gentlemen, is made by men and women. National experience is the product of those who do the living under that flag. It is their living that has created its significance, ”
The flag has always been important in our community. Not only does it fly at government buildings but at schools, businesses, ball parks, and private homes.
The flag is an expression of national identity, of unity, pride, perseverance, freedom.
Fly it proudly Friday.
