Front porch: People are the substance behind flag

Tomorrow is July Fourth. The United States of America is officially 232 years old. Picnics, parades, fireworks, barbecues, trips to the lake – they’re all part of the big elaborate birthday party that’s on the calendar.

The true symbol of the day, of course, is the American flag, which will be everywhere.

I am intrigued and sometimes confused by our behavior regarding this most American of American symbols. It is fascinating to me how some of us ignore the flag altogether and how others of us wrap ourselves up in it with a self-righteous presumption that we’re the real deal and those who are different from us, aren’t. It seems to me this is a good time to be thinking about these things.

I am reminded of two stories about being American that somehow feel relevant as this subject bounces around in my head.

The first is a memory from long ago. When I was very little, we lived in a neighborhood of families many generations deep in native-born sons and daughters. A few families, like mine, had a different genealogy.

My German-born father, a naturalized American citizen, always put the flag out on holidays. And I remember – on each Fourth of July, especially – he’d go outside and look up and down the street to see if there were any other flags flying.

There was always just one other, directly across the street from us. My father would say to my mother, who was the daughter of immigrant parents, “Well, Julia, it’s just us and the (family across the street).”

I’ve forgotten that family’s name all these years later, but I remember they were an older couple who had emigrated from Hungary.

The second story is from later, when I was a student at the University of Florida. My roommate, Karen Hishinuma, and I used to talk about what being American means.

She was born in America, as were her parents; it was her grandparents who came from Japan. If being American had to do with longevity on these shores, she was more American than I. But I “looked” American, and she didn’t.

Often, when we’d go places together off campus in Gainesville, where the flag flew everywhere (often alongside the stars and bars), people would come up to her and speak loudly, deliberately and slowly and say in pidgin English some variation on “What part China you from?”

Karen would sweetly and softly say, in return pidgin-speak, “Ka-low-rah-doh.” It took a few seconds for people to get it, and then they mostly got embarrassed and said a lot of stupid things as they sought to extricate themselves, awkwardly. Some people never got it.

The first story reminds me that sometimes it’s the newcomers who cherish the flag – and what it symbolizes – the most. And the second reminds me that for all the flag waving I see, a lot of people who consider themselves the true Americans cling to the symbol fiercely but are much less loyal to or passionate about the people who make up this great democratic experiment that is America.

As a nation we can go a little nuts when our flag is treated badly at home or abroad. We don’t go quite so nuts over the bad treatment of our fellow Americans, whether it’s done by others or by ourselves in the name of some cause or other.

I think there are people or groups or countries who deliberately abuse our flag to elicit certain knee-jerk reactions from us. It feels like orchestrated manipulation to me, and I don’t want to play that game.

The flag is a symbol of us, but it’s not really us. We the people are us. Stepping on my flag isn’t stepping on me (or my country). Stepping on me is stepping on me.

I put out my flag, too, on the major holidays. And it does stir me. If history is any predictor, I will have a full heart when I see the flag all over town tomorrow. I will celebrate it. But when I look at the flag, it’s not stars and stripes I see.

I see the great mix of people who stand behind the flag and who put the real substance into the symbol; they are the promise of America.