The Subject is Flags

 I do love flags.  I have no idea who thunk up the first one, or if it was even symbolic, representative or communicative.  Once, just slightly more than a few years back, and NPR radio show that is now defunct, issued a contest to design a new flag for the LGBTQIA+ movement given the ground that had passed since the Stonewall Riot and adoption of the Rainbow flag.  (which, btw, has red on the top!--a local Episcopal church spent two recent Junes flying it upside down out of ignorance, so it's worth mentioning.)

I sent them this design in which I incorporated the original Rainbow along with the Nazi Pink triangle as a recognition of oppression.  I filled it with a variety of flesh-toned gender symbols interlocked to express the full range of human relationships.  I thought it rather clever, beautiful and meaningful--but it didn't win or even get acknowledged.  As I recall the winning design resembled the Alaskan state Flag with stars on a dark background.  The guest judge was Michael Mizrahi and he blathered on about unique aesthetics and such, and thus ended the entire enterprise.  Why did I even bother?

Though I do love the Alaskan state flag.  So simple and so perfectly symbolic of our out-sized, most-northern, nature-defined state.  So many of the Flags that represent states follow the pattern of a color-meaningful background with a complicated "white supremacist" emblem in the middle.  White Supremacist in the sense that it depicts the conquest of the land and in some cases the actual removal of the indigenous populations.  Another antiquated and White Supremacist characteristic incorporated in state flags that once formed part of the traitorous civil war south, is a reference to the Confederate flag.  In both cases, the flag that is intended to be representative of the state, by its very design, announces the second-class oppressed citizenship of key populations of the state.  How such flags are even permitted to exist as a reflection of the beloved tenets of our Constitution are beyond me.

In recent years, two states have sought to reconcile these offenses with new designs.

Mississippi's new flag no longer contains a reference to the treasonous White Supremacy Confederacy.  Minnesota's new flag no longer contains an emblem that glorifies the eradication of Native Peoples.  And Honestly?  I love both designs.