The Enduring Glory of Red, White and Blue

I love our flag. I love the way it looks, so handsomely designed, and with such strong and lively colors. I love what it was created to signify. The stars are the states. Fifty states, 50 stars. Those bright stars dominate, but are also held together by a field of dark blue, which you can imagine as our federal government. The stars aren’t sewn into the blue on big official American flags but onto the blue, which is fitting, since the states created the federal government, not the other way around. So they adorn--and dominate--the thing they created.

Then there are the red and white stripes, which express the suffering it took to get to the blue, and the stars. The crisp snow of Valley Forge was streaked by the blood of hungry, bootless patriots who wore rags on their feet in the worst of the winter of 1777-78. The American nurses in the tunnels of Corregidor bound the wounds of soldiers who were dragged in half-alive. The surgeons and soldiers of Gettysburg, the Argonne, Khe Sanh--that’s your red and white, your blood and healing.

I love what the flag represents. I believe it represents for most of us the greatest Constitution in the history of man, the greatest Bill of Rights, the most beautiful and stirring Declaration of Independence. (It is beautiful in part because it is marked by such calm rhetorical reasoning: “A decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind” compels us to explain our reasons for leaving the oppressive English state, taking for ourselves what God always meant for man to have--freedom. It is, truly, one of the most courteous declarations of war. (Well, at least at the beginning. It got a little hotter as its writers warmed to their subject.)

The flag represents, too, all the people who risked their lives, and gave their lives, and gave up a portion of their own personal freedom--in boot camp, on the training field, in Hanoi Hilton--to defend America’s freedoms. Which are my freedoms, and yours. I always wish I could say to them, “Oh, thank you, I am very grateful.” So, that’s what I say to young soldiers now, and National Guard members. I’m really saying, “Oh, Gen. U.S. Grant, thank you; thank you, Ike; and thank you, Dad, for being a replacement troop in the U.S. Army in Italy in 1944.”

I was brought up by Irish immigrants who came here after the turn of the last century. I somehow absorbed from them, and from the old movies of the 1930s that we all watched on TV, a sense that America is a wonderful country and its flag a fitting object of love. (Thank you, John Ford!) So with that, and being a New Yorker and a lover of the stories of the great battles of the past, when I see the flag, it is very easy for me to see in my mind’s eye the flag being held high by the father of Gen. Douglas MacArthur--Lt. Arthur MacArthur of the Union Army, who won the Medal of Honor for refusing to let the colors fall at the battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee. I see it held high by troops marching forward from Brooklyn Heights to Shiloh--high in the field, racing forward, whipped by bullets, whipped by winds, but it is there--still there.

So, it represents these things, and I love it for representing these things.

These days, we are perhaps more conscious than usual that our flag represents our unity as a nation. Here you might expect me to say that in America in 2001 the flag is held high by black hands, white hands, beige hands, yellow hands, red hands--and all that is true, and more beautiful than we sometimes notice. All of us love our great imperfect country! It takes grit to love the big imperfect thing you’re in. But let me add something that strikes me as just as remarkable, for the greatest divisions in our country are not, I think, always, or really, racial. Our flag is held high, also, by ... the brilliant, the spiritual, the dim-witted, the crude, the elegant, the rich, the poor, the field worker, the dress designer, the governor, the inmate at Rikers Island prison, the scientist and cleaning woman, the sinful and saintly and sophisticated and simple; it is held high by everyone who wants to. It is a great unifier, our flag, an utterly egalitarian one: All you have to do to have the right to love it, and hold it, is to want to. That’s a great thing.

And when we hold it high, we say two things. The first is that we believe in the forever-young assertions of its founding documents: We stand for these documents, for that Constitution and that Bill of Rights and that Declaration. We stand, that is, for our past, and for the future that spills out so rich with its achievable promise.

And it communicates this: We are united. We are together. We share this place. “We hold these truths.”

Let me tell you what it’s like to not have a flag.

I live in Manhattan, in wonderful socialist-agnostic, non-patriotic Manhattan. (I know, I generalize: Some of the most God-loving, literally God-loving, and also patriotic people I have ever met are here.) We are an island off the continent of the United States, and we long ago learned to take our apartness seriously.

So, let me tell you what it was like here, on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days afterward. People started saying, “We need a flag. Do you have a flag?” No one had a flag, because this is Manhattan. But suddenly we understood and knew that we loved our flag, and we wanted to show that love, we wanted to show unity and respect. (This is how I learned: Americans are never without a flag, it lives inside them even when they don’t know it.)

I had a flag. It was a big ceremonial flag that once flew over the U.S. Capitol. I got it out from the closet, and when my son finally got home after the explosions--he had been in school in Brooklyn Heights, across the river from the Towers; he had seen the billows of volcanic ash fill the sky, had seen people weep on the streets, had not been able to return home, had spent the night with a teacher who took him in--he and I took the flag, and together, taking turns on a chair and hammering, we nailed it to the glass-paned front door of our home, and we put on the hall light so everyone could see it: big, and there.

And let me tell you what happened: The doorman came and shook my hand. Strangers came by and knocked softly, and when I opened the door, they said, “Thanks.” And that night, slipped under my back door, there was a business card with handwriting. It’s in front of me now, taped to my computer. It says, “Thank you, Ms. Noonan. Thank you for showing our colors.” It was signed by a man who lives upstairs. I turned the card over and it had the gentleman’s name, and then: Solomon Smith Barney Inc., Seven World Trade Center, 28th floor.

His whole world had just come apart. And he was writing me a note to say thank you for putting up our flag.

In the days that followed, wonderful things happened. Our newspapers printed full-page, full-color flags, and they said, “Take this and put it in your window.” Everyone did. There are flags all over Manhattan now, and it isn’t that all of a sudden we’re not atheists in a foxhole; it’s that all of a sudden we remembered: That flag is us. It was within us. And I don’t think we’ll ever forget what we learned.

I don’t think we’ll ever let it disappear again.

Here is an idea. All this patriotism is very nice and moving and sweet, but it will be even better if it becomes very meaningful. Here’s one way. (This is what I’m going to do today, Sunday, with my son.)

Go to your computer and go to a site--there are a lot of them--that has the U.S. Constitution. Click and print. Then get the Bill of Rights, in a special separate version. Click, print. Go to the Declaration of Independence. Click and print. Then get one of the little flags or flag decals or pins everyone has now.

Take all those papers, still warm from the printer, in your hand. And say to your child, “See these words? These words are what this flag means. This flag--these words. People literally died holding this flag up in battle--because it represented these words. These are great words. Let’s read them.

“We hold these truths ... “