I found this compelling image while looking around on google images for something that reflects my feelings about this day. Symbols such as flags are receptacles for the feelings, values and images we choose to put into them. They are shorthand, representing something else that's larger, something that it would take more time and effort to appreciate with fullness and depth. 

As citizens of the US we value speed and efficiency, access and convenience. Generations younger than myself have grown up enjoying the ease of sending messages to someone to whom they are electronically connected in a second. To read about and appreciate the history of a nation as complex, troubled and aspirational as the USA becomes more difficult as a thin, terrible cloud of unknowing in the form of tweets and electronic residue settles on the outer folds of our collective cerebrum.

On this day I make time and space to consider what the flag holds for the descendants of Cherokee who were forced to march thousands of miles away from their homelands by local and state militias in the 19th century, and what it holds for descendants of those militias and descendants of those that signed orders 'justifying' the actions. 

I wonder what the flag holds for the descendants, now US citizens, of enslaved Africans who worked as forced laborers under continual threat of whipping, without pay for the benefit of others, on this day 242 years ago when members of the dominant culture celebrated the signing of a document declaring that all people have the right to life, liberty and the purfuit of happiness, and what the flag holds for the thousands of descendants of slaveholding families who feel the shame of their family history and are taking steps to atone for that history.

I imagine what the Stars and Stripes holds for every family that has served in the US military in its centuries of actions defending the nation as well as its interventions in other nations’ conflicts and yes, its illegitimate attacks on other nations. I especially think of the descendants of Vietnamese, Japanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Liberian, Sudanese, and dozens of other peoples whose ancestors, like my own, struggled to find ways to travel to the US for a life for their children that would better provide security and prosperity, compared to what they were experiencing in their own homelands.

I have hope that more US citizens will take the time to acknowledge and accept the full and complete history of the nation, to broaden their field of vision and contemplate everything that’s held in the soil over which they live and travel. May we come to see the perils in the convenience of simplicity, the expediency of surfaces, the delusion of electronic connectivity and the anxiety underlying unquestioned tribal loyalty. May we teach our children how to create brave space that includes all of humanity and nature, including their own natures, so they may recognize that often, it is the one we reflexively judge as ‘other’ that holds exactly what we need to carry us to the next step in our heart’s opening and our soul’s evolution.

"We The People," Wayne Eagleboy (Onondaga) buffalo hide, acrylic, barbed wire, 1971