On one of the last days of our time in Minnesota, my mother and I drove past a house. But the unremarkable house isn’t what made us squeal our car’s brakes and fall forward in our seats.
Pictured above is the perfect example of an average home in Brainerd, Minnesota. Beige paintjob, half-visible rooms, windows that likely have a plastic covering on the inside in preparation for winter temperatures like our own home does. It’s completely normal in every way.
The flag that hangs next to the door, however, is not.
You might miss it in the first picture. From a distance, it looks like an American flag. The stars and stripes are absolutely recognizable without much effort. But on closer inspection, one can see as it blows in the wind that it isn’t at all our traditional Old Glory. Rather, it is a black American flag with one token blue line running through it.
We hadn’t seen that before. I mean, who makes the American flag black? In our minds, this looked like a flag someone who was seriously anti-American would put up. It was stitched so well (we could see that even from a fair distance) that it was clearly a flag created not by a sewing machine, but rather in a factory. That meant these were mass produced? Couldn’t be. That said, we definitely were curious.
We got out of the car to knock on the door.
We hesitated.
We got back in the car and drove away to talk about it.
Black isn’t exactly a flattering color for our country, after all. Furthermore, the colors red, white and blue all have been assigned meanings that correspond to the American values the flag represents. According to USFlag.org, “The colors of the pales (the vertical stripes) are those used in the flag of the United States of America; White signifies purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valour, and Blue, the color of the Chief (the broad band above the stripes) signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice." It goes on to say that Smithsonian writers claim, "The star is a symbol of the heavens and the divine goal to which man has aspired from time immemorial; the stripe is symbolic of the rays of light emanating from the sun."
All of those values are positive in nature. Trying to redefine the same flag with black and a thin blue stripe was impossible for us to decipher.
So, we went up and asked the owner what it represented. Our reasoning: You don’t post a flag like that without expecting someone to notice, and perhaps the homeowners flew it because they wanted the attention.
A woman with kind eyes but a furrowed brow answered the door, and we asked her a little timidly about the flag. She said that she strongly supports our local police and that this flag is part of a movement called ‘The Thin Blue Line.’ With so much strife thrown against local police forces, she wanted to make a statement. We asked where she got the flag and she said anyone can get one through amazon.com.
We thanked the kind woman, got back in our car, and took some pictures. As my mother and I talked, we decided the message she wanted to send wasn’t bad at all. The Thin Blue Line flag represents support for the great police officers of Minnesota. For me, I felt that in theory it’s a good message. The law enforcement I’d met at the State Fair, parades, and even in a restaurant once should be supported.
Enter here the big HOWEVER.
If I misinterpreted the meaning of this flag, I bet other people did as well. Why does the main color have to be black? If I didn’t know now that this flag symbolizes a movement praising law enforcement, I would guess you were trying to say that America is evil. If I went with that line of thinking, that black is bad, their flag would make me ask if law enforcement is the innocent party in all of the latest controversies while the rest of us are the deepest shade of gray? Why couldn’t movement sponsors come up with a brand new flag, instead of changing the colors of the one that represents our country?
In short, my question is this. If you didn’t know what this flag represented before I told you, would you guess that it was in support of law enforcement? Now that you do know what it means, would you say that it subordinates the message of the U.S. flag in favor of its own? If it does, is that okay?
One thing for certain is that this flag makes you look. But I put this to you: did it make you think about the police? Or, did it just make you think?
Sources:
http://usflag.org/colors.html
