A Symbol of Endurance
By Mike BayhamSpecial To HNN
South Louisiana (HNN)---Three years ago I bought an American flag kit so I could fly our nation’s banner at my home. Unfortunately, it never went up because a friend of mine had misplaced his ceramic drill bit (I needed to affix the base into a brick wall) and so it rested in a corner behind my front door awaiting eventual placement, unmoved that is until August 29, 2005.
About a month after Hurricane Katrina sent eleven feet of salt water and sludge followed up by a major oil spill at a local refinery sent tens of thousands barrels of crude into residential areas of Chalmette, I re-entered my home for the first time to salvage what few possessions the terrible storm had spared.
Though I was bundled with protective gear that sweltering day and was awestruck at the sight of my living room, I felt something under one of my rubber boots, which sank a few inches with every step, and found my once pristine flag still attached to its pole at the bottom of a thick, toxic soup that an earlier encounter with had left a permanent chemical burn on my left ankle.
Now one of the first rules of flag stewardship we learn as children is that the flag should never touch the ground, as it would be considered desecrated and subject to “retirement,” a intricate process by which a weathered or soiled flag is dismembered stripe by stripe before the pieces are either buried or cremated.
Nature and an industrial accident had given this Old Glory a beating that qualified it for ceremonial disposal, but rather than furling the flag for later retiring by the American Legion, I found my opportunity to display it.
Plucking it from the morass in which it had been submerged for weeks, I walked out to my front yard and firmly planted the pole into the water-logged soil covered with dead grass where it has now stood for nine months, despite bad weather and despicable looters.
Many people fly the flag in the aftermath of tragedy as a means of exhibiting grief, support, unity and/or endurance.
One of the iconic visuals from 9-11 was the raising of the flag by firemen over the still smoldering rubble at the World Trade Center. Not long after the terrorist attack, Americans flocked to stores to buy flags, with the demand overwhelming the supply. Accusations against some vendors for price gouging were not uncommon nor were flag thefts from homes.
The passing of President Ronald Reagan was another instance when many citizens displayed the red, white and blue to express their respect for the man who guided the Free World to victory over the Soviets.
What motivated me to finally put my sullied stars and stripes to good use was our national anthem, Francis Scott Key’s poetic recollection of the British assault on Baltimore set to the tune of a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.”
After having humiliated the young republic by burning its capital, the British targeted the strategic port city just north of Washington, though they were frustrated by the American defenders, a turning point in the War of 1812 that would reach its climactic end on January 8, 1815, about two miles from my house.
Key, who was detained on a British prison ship, only learned of the battle’s outcome in United States’ favor when he gazed at the oversized American flag run-up over Fort McHenry, which had withstood a spectacular bombardment courtesy of His Majesty’s navy.
And so in an area where swamp grass rested on the roofs of houses that also bear distinct water lines and oil lines and where a half-dozen two-story houses had floated hundreds of feet across a drainage canal into other people’s homes, my muck-stained flag symbolized both the catastrophic damage my community had sustained and that we were still there.
Happy 230th America.
Mike Bayham is a political consultant in south Louisiana and can be reached at MikeBayham@yahoo.com