When I go for a walk at night, I notice that fully a quarter of the houses are flying an American flag outside. In total darkness. Here's an example: oh say can you see the American flag in there somewhere?
I can feel you shudder, dear reader, because you and I both hold very close to our hearts the undying words of 4 U.S. Code Chapter 1 §6a: "It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed 24 hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness."
Say "amen" somebody.
My neighbors though--whom I love--are carrying out a systematic protest day after day after day by flying the flag throughout the day and throughout the night--and the latter time without proper illumination. It is particularly interesting to me that the Code says to illuminate the flag "when a patriotic effect is desired." So, logically it means that my very loveable and worthy neighbors, by flying the flag in the darkness, desire just the opposite: an unpatriotic effect. Say it isn't so.
But I don't know! That's just the thing. I wish I could be illuminated as to the reason for the lack of illumination of their flags at night time.
4 U.S.C. Chapter 1 is known as "the flag code." It has the same status as 36 U.S.C. Chapter 3 §301, which defines the national anthem and delineates the proper conduct to observe during its playing/singing. Certain professional football players have recently been observed not observing that conduct, and this has kicked up considerable brouhaha. Football is after the national sport, pace those individuals who misguidedly think that baseball--a patient game of split-second occasions of the use of lightning reflexes, played without continuous violence, without armor, and without any attendant metaphorical descriptors invoking warfare--can possibly claim any real connection to the American psyche.
But I know what those guys are doing. They are African-Americans, and they are using the occasion to complain of false advertising in the Pledge of Allegiance, which announces "liberty and justice for all," but in practice seems to come with a considerable amount nod-nod-wink-wink read-the-fine-print type stuff: "Caveat civis: this offer may not apply in all police jurisdictions, some of which may enable individual officers to apply extrajudicial capital punishment without disciplinary consequence to unarmed black men if the officers' grandmothers scared them as children with stories of Negro boogeymen, or any other such excuse whether lame or legal."
They also claim to observe a pattern of bait-and-switch in the American system vis-a-vis its black population, e.g. the Declaration of Independence "all men are created equal" excepting anyone with African blood; and e.g. again the 15th amendment saying the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged in the United States or in any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" but being used by Southern legislators as a parlor game called "Jim Crow, Lynching, and the KKK: The White Citizens Funtime Way of Razzing the 15th Amendment."
OK, so we know what they're protesting. But there's this brouhaha, like I said, because people are all like, "Look, if you're going to violate the National Anthem Statute, you'd better be organized about it. Colin Kaepernick? One dude! And then one week it's a few more, then Trump tweets, and it's a whole bunch, then it dies back down. That's not getting the job done! Think Boston Tea Party! Think Montgomery Bus Boycott! Y'all ain't organized! Where's the Sons of Black Liberty? Where's the NAACNFLP? Get organized and put ALL of your bodies on the line, week in and week out, until it's not just you taking a knee, it's the league itself! If people aren't boycotting football because of what you're doing, and the owners aren't losing money, you aren't doing it right!"
People are rightly pissed because these athletes don't seem to have learned the lesson of Martin Luther King, Jr., who famously wrote from the Birmingham jail that the purpose of direct action is to create a crisis. Look, it doesn't matter who agrees with you or disagrees with you about respecting the flag. You want to accomplish something, right? There will not be a resolution of the problem that you are drawing attention to unless there is a crisis that produces the kind of negotiation or legal action or voter action that produces the change you seek. Until that happens, you're just wasting your time, ginning things up because it makes you feel better. If you're not organized and persistent, it ain't gonna happen. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement. Forget about the naysayers. There's never a right time or place or way to protest according to the people who don't give a shit about your cause.
So that's what the brouhaha is about. But all that does nothing to help me figure out my neighbors, all the ones who are breaking the law about the flag. What are they protesting? Daylight savings time? Burning leaves after dark so you won't be caught? Having potable water unlike Flint, MI? The Federal Reserve System? Political Correctness? Political Incorrectness? Electricity? 4 U.S. Code Chapter 1 §6a?
I really think they're purposely creating an unpatriotic effect by which to say--in their own quiet way--that the national sport of the United States is hypocrisy.
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