The great blog 1050

Cultural Confidence or Cultural Retreat? The Future of the American Flag

One summer evening I watched a small-town council argue over whether to keep a flag on a traffic circle. The flag had been there since the 1970s, put up by a veterans’ group that still tended the flowers beneath it. A few residents wanted it removed during a streetscape update. Not to replace it with anything controversial, they said, but to avoid controversy altogether. Their argument sounded tidy: fewer symbols, fewer fights. The veterans countered that the flag had seen