Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Stars and Stripes


I didn't realize until this morning that it is Flag Day. So I thought, well - that's cool. I can certainly get a photo of a flag today. There are garden flags, the "real" one on the front of the house and numerous others around the house as well. We Americans put our flag on everything that doesn't move and on some things that do! And I love it. Some people might say that it loses its meaning when it is plastered everywhere. I don't agree. I think we may take it for granted and after a while we don't even notice. But we would notice if all of them suddenly disappeared. My most precious flag is the veteran's funeral flag presented to me after my husband's death. It is safely folded and stored in a glass case on the fireplace mantle. 

I don't care if people outside of this country think that we over-flag. This quote by W. Somerset Maugham comes to mind:

"It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them."

1 comment:

Brent said...

When I came upon this message, I thought for sure I had commented. I was going to say this has a very "space race" feel. And after the last shuttle launch, the feeling is even stronger. If only that pesky website address wasn't there.