Flying the American flag in Arizona after January 6th, 2021


I live in Glendale, Arizona, which is a suburb of Phoenix, and have done so since 1994. One of the first things I did when I bought the house that I'm still in was to buy a nice American flag, and fly it proudly.

Over the years I replaced it, and then about eighteen years ago my health suffered so badly that climbing a ladder became impossible for me. Yes, I got better, but I never replaced the flag. As I write this, there's still no flag flying at my house, but there will be. I will never be able to do stuff like walk on the roof, but I can climb a ladder long enough to fly the flag. My father fought for it in Okinawa, I can climb a ladder!


In the meantime, I decided to have the Captain America logo on my trike, which I ride around my neighborhood, and into Peoria, every morning. I have little American flags that I can fly on the trike, which I did when our new president was elected, but after a while I reconsidered doing that. I'll see if I can explain, especially if you're reading this way in the future, and have only heard about January 6th.

It was a fascinating story, which I watched on mainstream media, and also "in the raw" streaming on an app called TikTok. I'm not really all that interested in politics, but I'm a history nerd, and there was talk of something that had never happened in the history of the United States, a non-peaceful transition of power from president to president. If you're a history buff, you know that's a very dangerous situation, and I really didn't worry too much about it. Not accepting a transition of power is technically called a "coup d'etat", which is a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government. And the last it happened on American soil was 1776, which was when the American Continental army rose up against the British (there was no USA yet, and people living in the colonies were subjects of the English king). Benjamin Franklin wasn't kidding when he said that they must all hang together, or they would hang separately. That's what happens with a revolution. If you fail, you're punished.

What makes the attempted coup of January 6th, 2021 so confusing is that both sides claimed the same flag. And since I live in Arizona, I had seen quite a lot of American flags flying which were clearly aligned with revolution, that is, not acceptance of the transition of power to the new president.

It's February of 2021, and I still ride around, and I still see a few signs that show clear support of the revolution. I just ride on by, and keep my eyes pointed front. There are all kinds of flags, and inevitably the American flag is flying alongside them. I'm not seeing Confederate flags anymore, but there are still Gadsden flags, and often flags that are even more specific. No, I'm not going to describe them here in a blog post, but I am going to tell you what I'm going to do.

I will go get an American flag and fly it. In my mind, the other flags can be relegated to history, but not Old Glory. I'm a fiercely proud American, and just because it's been used in a way that I disagree with doesn't mean that I'm going to give up on it. That's not how this works. This kind of thing has been done before, and what springs to my mind is the Christian cross, which the Ku-Klux-Klan used to send its message of terror. But they were never able to take the cross, and as long as I have a fighting heart, they'll never take the American flag.

Let tyrants remember the day!
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