My flag.

[icebluenothing]

C-ko asked me the other night where I got it -- the simple, small, American flag cloisonne pin I've taken to wearing on the collar of my trenchcoat.

I admitted to her that it wasn't something I'd run out and bought in a sudden fit of patriotic fervor -- that it was, in fact, something my mother had given me as a present years ago. "Uhh, thanks," I told my mother, and promptly tossed it in the back of a drawer and forgot about it. I found it recently and decided to start wearing it.

I've never been particularly drawn to the American flag. It's an unappealing, garish symbol, one that's too busy, trying to do too much. (So, in a way, it's completely appropriate.) I think a much older flag, the Gadsden flag from Revolutionary times, is much more emotionally evocative symbol, with its rattlesnake, and its simple message. One that's certainly appropriate for our Current Situation.

But a lot of people have been wearing and displaying flags lately, in support and solidarity for all the souls we lost on September 11th; it's felt like one long, strange, funereal Independence Day. Except the theme has been more like interdependence. I can get behind that. I wanted to wear a flag, too.

A lot of people have sneered at this kind of thing, all this flag-waving. Yes, the flag is often flown by those with small, aggressive minds. A lot of people think the flag means, support the president, no matter what. A lot of people think the flag means, war is the best solution. Or they think it means, our God can beat up your Allah. Or, sit down, shut up, and keep in line.

But my own small, quiet point is -- the flag doesn't belong to them. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to me, and to anyone in the world who wants to come here and call this land home and this banner theirs, no matter whether they believe in one God or many or none at all. If we abandon the flag to the usual flag-wavers, to the conformist mouth-breathers -- then they've won.

I nearly lost my flag tonight.

I got home and got out of the truck and my seatbelt somehow caught the pin, snagged it, and sent it flying, out into the dark. I heard it fall -- under the car next to me, I thought.

And for a moment, the little Zen wannabe in me thought, oh, well, there it goes. You'll never find it, but don't worry, it doesn't really matter. You shouldn't be so attached to little material possessions.

I found myself getting really angry with this voice, and decided firmly that just giving up like that was completely inappropriate. Giving up, I decided, was not what the goddamn flag was about.

I marched into my apartment, grabbed a Maglite, and came back out and got down on my hands and knees in the cold and rain and looked for my flag in the dark, found it under a neighbor's car and strained out to reach it, brought it back inside.

I hadn't known this little pin meant so much to me. But it looks like it does.