Once upon a time, being in the presence of the American flag meant showing respect.
Homeofheroes.com emphasizes that “respect” is not just a “deferential regard,” but is also very much an action verb. A traditional show of respect for the American flag included these careful actions:
never carrying it flat or horizontally, never touching
anything beneath it (such as the ground or the floor), never using it for commercial advertising purposes, never using it in a way that can easily harm it, considering it as a living thing, never using it as a carrying receptacle, destroying it when
necessary in a dignified way, and never using it as wearing apparel.
What a long and winding road we have traveled from traditions such as these to our present-day flag bikinis. This is indicative of an overall malaise within a society that has replaced respect with abuse, and the once-sacred with the now-hedonistic. In the 1960s for example, it became not only popular to discredit the flag, but also popular to discredit the veterans
themselves.
A 1972 article from the Journal
of Clinical Child Psychology titled An editor’s reflections
on youth: Toward the liberation of psychology reported that youth have “mocked the Puritan Ethic” – and have not only slaughtered the sacred cow, but also the sacred bull.
To illustrate this “Generation Zap,” a poem by Julian Beck (then-“guru” of The Living Theatre) was included. It
begins, “We want to zap them with holiness…” and continues, “we want to put music and truth in our
underwear” [along with the flag and who knows what else?].
Now we’re not saying that the flag (or anything/anyone else for that matter) should be idolized (or even idealized). But we are saying that respectfully challenging America’s wrongs,
or prophetically zapping America out of her complacency, takes a whole lot more doing than barely covering one’s you-know-
what with the stars and stripes.
Resources
http://www.homeofheroes.com/hallofheroes/1st_floor/flag/1bfb_disp6.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15374417209532468
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