There's An American Flag On The Moon

I’m a simpleton. I love America.

If the only reason I’m so patriotic is because my schools, my upbringing, the media and The Matrix successfully propagandized me, that’s fine. So be it - if they tricked me, I’m glad they did.

I’m dramatic about my love for America - romantic even. It’s integral to my being and self-understanding: I am an American; and this thought can guide my actions and - in positive and negative ways - even influence my emotions. This was evidenced today when I grinned like an idiot while passing under a bridge. Who knows how long ago, some rogue citizen hastily zip-tied Old Glory to the chainlink pedestrian fence that intersects above Wootton Parkway in Rockville, Maryland. The flag has now hung there for years as a vigorous and unapologetic reminder to the cars below: You are here. Not just in Rockville, you are here in America. I smile each time I see it because - despite it being there, clearly unauthorized, for years - no one has taken it down.

Betsy Ross allegedly hand-sewed our beloved Stars and Stripes in the spring of 1776, diligently getting to work as soon as the esteemed General Washington handed her a pencil sketch he’d made. The legend is unfortunately, most definitely not true, but this apocryphal story about a little small-town upholsterer in her 20s - just a girl - convincing the most important man in the country to arrange the thirteen stars into a circle is important nonetheless.

Each of us is Betsy Ross, doing the best we can in our little town, hoping that some grand opportunity will call us up to contribute to something greater.

You probably haven’t looked at your loose change in awhile. The motto of The United States is engraved in Latin on each coin: E pluribus unum.

Out of many, one.

The first week of June, I spent seven days driving from Florida to New York, and made ten stops along the way (shoutout my homies!). Two of these stops - Aiken, South Carolina and Ellendale, Delaware - are both small, seemingly insignificant, 35-mile-an-hour passthrough towns. You could drive right through ‘em and not even know. Despite their great distance and the strong chance that no one from Aiken has ever physically crossed paths with someone from Ellendale, they struck me as very similar in their respect for one symbol: the American flag.

The houses on Main Street collect highway dust and traffic noise, and in return, offer passing cars a red-white-and-blue window into their lives and what they believe in. There are American flags hanging off every porch. Every single porch. And the streetposts too. In each house, one family member put it up for the very first time. Even though there is no practical purpose in doing so, he did. It just felt good, almost like he was supposed to do it. He takes it down, folds it, and brings it inside to protect it when there’s a storm. He washes it when necessary, gives it a passing glance when he comes back from work, a nod or a shake of the head when he doesn’t like what the news tells him, and will certainly cause a scene if anyone tries to rip it down. His chest wells with pride when he looks at it every Olympics or Memorial Day or July 4th or any other time he can find an excuse to reflect on his love for his country.

Why? Why care so much about a hanging piece of cloth? What does it mean? I can only guess, but I think it means:

 Sure, I’m from this small one-horse, one-stoplight, do-nothing town, but that’s not all I am. I belong to more than that. 

We all belong to more than that. We’re all from our own do-nothing town. Aiken and Ellendale are 631 miles from each other, but bound together by America and her flag. Out of many, one.

My all-time favorite “chore” is mowing the lawn. It’s been a decade since I first popped in my wired headphones and started pushing, nodding to country songs, thinking about girls, worrying if I would get cut from JV, and believing that I was becoming a man, whatever that meant.

It was a cool, Maryland pre-dusk evening in July 2015 when Pandora’s Patriotic Country Radio romanticized my night sky forever, via American Flag on The Moon by Brad Paisley. The chorus goes as follows:

Tonight, I dare you to dream

Go on, believe impossible things

Whenever anybody says there’s anything we can’t do

I mean after all, there’s an American flag on the moon.

Nowadays, that’s all I think about when I see the moon, and that’s what the American flag represents to me: I can do impossible things. We can do impossible things.

If you were to take a picture of an American flag, from which angle would you take it? Would you get a ladder or a crane, stand above it, and take the photo with the ground as the backdrop? Of course not. The background is always the sky, a sky of limitless potential and an endless freedom.

I write this on June 14th - Flag Day, commemorating when the Second Continental Congress adopted our flag on June 14th, 1777. Those Founding Fathers were romantic about America too. The Flag Resolution states that:

“The flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”

Representing a new constellation, they said. A new constellation - a new assortment of stars that earthly beings, mortal beings, those of us down here, so small and full of wonder, can admire, dream about, and find meaning from.

When I look into the night sky, the millions of stars, the moon, the celestial abyss, the great unknown, the great wide open, the face of our cosmic Maker, a terrifying sea of never-ending and ever-expanding possibilities, I feel much of the same terrifyingly beautiful feeling that the American flag makes me feel. I belong to this. We belong to this. Yes, we’re small, but we still play a part.

We belong to the United States - the first empire to acknowledge the integrity of man as an emotional, rather than rational, being. We can do impossible things because we have done them before. It’s more than just a piece of cloth, because we said so. We have the freedom to decide such for ourselves, freedom to believe in anything we want, and freedom to look at the stars and decide there’s a meaning in that too. Hell, we can even reach the Moon if we try.

The American flag invites us to wonder and dream. It is our right and our responsibility to do so.

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