The 50-Star Flag

Monday, January 31 2005
Genocide… It’s worth a little disrespect
Bret McAtee @ 10:15 pm

The first thing you have to envision is a mid size gymnasium in a Christian School. At one end of the Basketball court, about 20 feet high, tacked or stapled to a white stucco background, is a normally sized Christian flag. One really has to squint in order to see it since the white Christian flag blends into obscurity against the white stucco background. At the other end of the Basketball court is a huge American flag that looks like it is trying to make it into the Guinness book of World records as the most tacky American flag ever put in a gymnasium. Technically, it is not a flag, but something that looks like it was made out of a giant Lincoln Logs kit, replete with a do it yourself red, white, and blue spray painting manual. I kid you not … you could put 6 Christian flags inside the parameters of this American “Flag.” A blind man doesn’t have to squint to see this thing.

Next comes the music. I think they used a phonograph with a vinyl record. At least the recording of the Star Spangled Banner sounded like something that was pressed when Kate Smith was still trim and in her prime. Around me stood a couple hundred earnest God fearing Christians singing at the top of their sanctified voices, and there was my son and I, definitively not standing, trying to ignore the fact that we weren’t being ignored.

I’m sorry. I just don’t get it. Really, it is not like that I haven’t tried to get it. Here we are as a nation killing 4000 unborn babies a day and Evangelical Christians want to get all choked up while singing the National Anthem? Here we are trying to make Iraq safe enough so they too can start safely killing babies in their freshly minted Democracy and people want to cast a quick glance at the seated forms of my son and I and whisper … “Psst, Hey Martha, check out that cranky Reformed Pastor. He and his son aren’t standing again for the National Anthem.” Well, excuse me if I get in the way of your warm patriotic fuzzies. There they were pounding out at the top of their lungs … “The land of the free and the home of the Brave,” and nobody could see the irony and hypocrisy in that?

Look, we have no more business honoring this flag and the country for which it stand or singing its Anthem than German Christians had saluting the Nazi Flag and shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ as it passed by. To those who believe that we should snap to attention every time the flag gets unfurled I want to have a couple questions answered. At what point in a holocaust does one decide things have gotten so out of control that one can no longer be a proud American? How many bodies must be offered up to Molech until lines about ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ begin to curdle in your vocal chords?

Yes, yes … I know … I have been told a thousand times. Thinking that way isn’t nice and actually making those views known to people hurts their feelings. “Besides Pastor”, (so the routine goes) “what kind of witness are you if you sit down while the National Anthem is being played or while the colors are being posted?”

More Irony.

We stopped putting our flag out some years ago. I used to love to put it out. I guess it was in 2001 that it all hit the fan for us. It was a growing thought for various reasons the few years before that, which only exploded into absolute dislike of the symbolism when 9-11 happened.

So all the things that Bret mentioned in the above article I can understand and totally agree with as well.

I held a dear affection for the flag, but not for the Empire Strikes Back flag, the older flag, when it had less stars, when “secession” was considered a fine plank to be in any states “constitution”. When the country called These United States was a union of separate states united for reasons that most cannot even fathom today. I somehow had Old Glory shining in my eyes and that clouded my vision of the flag of my lifetime.

My vision was restored and I saw the ugly flag, and hide it in our hall closet now. I want to throw it away, but since I taught myself proper flag ettiquette so many years ago, I am loathe to destroy it, though I deeply want to.

I need no flag, but an older flag (reproduction of one) I WOULD fly, if I had one. I’m picky and refuse to consider a NYLON flag though, so I have no flag, with reproductions in fine fabrics being quite pricey. It’s just a flag. It would be a rebel symbol without being considered “racist” by most 😉 But symbols are not to be worshipped, it would only be a symbol of holding to retro-1800 views of sort. It wouldn’t be a fad, as so many are flying one since 9-11. It wouldn’t be a patriotic-nationalistic-pride thing flying a flag. It would be me standing tall and not being ashamed to say what I think.

But I can do that WITHOUT a flag. A do so gladly.

The military is one thing, bad enough. But abortion, it’s the killing of the innocent. The life that God gives is plucked from womens wombs by men and women who call themselves “doctors”. What is the first oath they take? Hmmmm. Maybe they just don’t do that anymore, or they just consider themselves above it.

This country has so much blood on it’s hands, so-called wars, and abortion, the killing of our young, the unborn, and the young men and women in the military.

Men and women are responsible for the murders of the unborn. Not just doctors, not just women, but regular men and women together conspire, and some are pregnant, some provided the seed, some are doctors. They all consent to kill together, sometimes with or without the consent of any of the mentioned parties. It’s just SO ACCEPTED today. It’s horrific.

You folks that grew up in this country after Roe vs. Wade was put into play may or may not understand the severity of it. It’s always been this way, you may think. No, in my lifetime it happened, I was small but have known about it, the before and after. So many things have culminated in my lifetime. The last century has been feather in Lincoln’s cap. 🙁