Alessandro van den Brink | Stars and stripes

Small Talk | It’s possible to love America and critique it at the same time

By Alessandro van den Brink 12/06/16 11:22pm

On Nov. 9, the American flag stood at half-mast at Hampshire College as a “reaction to the toxic tone of the monthslong election.” The following night, though, the flag was burned by an unidentified individual or group of individuals. The flag was quickly replaced and the college’s board of trustees decided to continue to fly it at half-mast in order to “mourn deaths from violence in the U.S. and around the world.”

But within a week of this incident, Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash declared that the flag would be taken down altogether. This caused an immediate backlash from veteran groups, and on Nov. 27, close to 400 veterans held a peaceful protest at the school demanding that Hampshire bring back the flag.

Lash justified the removal by saying that for many students the flag is “a powerful symbol of fear they’ve felt all their lives because they grew up in marginalized communities, never feeling safe.” This mirrors sentiments shown when students at Occidental College vandalized a Sept. 11 memorial by throwing out 2,997 U.S. flags that were planted by the school’s College Republicans. The anonymous perpetrators claimed that the flag represents an “exclusionary, nationalistic narrative.”

It is completely justified to be upset with the current state of the country as symbolized by the flag, but it’s important that people, particularly those on the left, critique the reality of America, not the idea of America. The country that we hope for as prophesied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is one where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness reign. There’s a valid case that America has not lived up to those principles, but instead of proclaiming the United States a lost cause, we need to ensure that we hold the country to these values by enacting the changes necessary to get there.

This is why Hampshire’s decision to permanently take down the flag troubles me. Of course, as a private institution, the college has every right to choose whether or not it will raise the flag, but it must understand the message it sends as result of that decision. Many people in this country have a strong bond with the flag and what it symbolizes, and instead of deriding them for it, we need to respect that.

Burning a flag or refusing to respect the national anthem are actions born out of frustration, but are not productive in the fight for actual change. When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose to bring attention to the incredibly important issue of racism in the criminal justice system by kneeling during the national anthem, he may have actually cast movements like Black Lives Matter in a worse light to many Americans. The vitriol his cause received in response was probably not worth the extended media attention.

To many at this moment, the American flag reflects a country divided, founded in an era when slavery was legal and only property-owning white men had any political power.

However, the symbolic meaning of the flag can change as the country changes. As we become more inclusive and start to gnaw away at the divisions that plague us, the American flag can become representative of a future, better America rather than the one that has disappointed so many of us.

It’s time to redefine what true patriotism is. A common stereotype propagated in smug articles like Rich Lowry’s “Yes, Liberals Are Less Patriotic” is that fewer liberals, according to Gallup surveys, feel proud to be American and believe the United States is the greatest country in the world. However, those who critique our country and push it to be better may be the most patriotic of us all, since they fight to fix the nation’s flaws rather than settling for complacency.

When liberals bring patriotic imagery such as the flag or the national anthem into their critiques of America, they are creating a distraction from their message and evoking unnecessary backlash from those who cherish the concepts behind those symbols. Some may respond that people who get so worked up over a piece of cloth and a song are the problem, but we have no business determining how emotionally attached those individuals are allowed to be to the country’s flag and anthem.

So I urge Hampshire College to bring back the flag. Instead of viewing it as emblematic of an imperfect American project, view it as a reminder that there’s still so much work to do, but it’s worth it.