William T. Kerr was just a Pittsburgh school kid when he founded the American Flag Day Association of Western Pennsylvania in 1888. Later, he became the national chairman of the association, a position he held for 50 years, and he was at President Truman’s side in 1949 when the law was signed establishing Flag Day as a national holiday.
Flagstaff Hill in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, known for summer movies under the stars, is also the site of the memorial that Kerr’s association sponsored in 1927 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American flag. The bronze monument was “erected by the penny contributions of one-hundred and eighty-eight thousand one-hundred sixty-three school children of Allegheny County.”
The American flag has always meant a lot around here and across the country. It is flown proudly in front yards and along Main Streets for national holidays, and public assemblies start with the national anthem and Pledge of Allegiance in recognition of the freedoms that the flag represents. And an American flag drapes the caskets of our military veterans.
People are passionate about the flag, and that can go either way. If you loved someone who stepped up or sacrificed it all while fighting under the flag, it shakes you deeply when the flag is burned or trampled to make a political statement. But we cherish our freedom of speech, and that makes the flag fair game.
Our flag is seen both ways around the world, too. News footage of the American flag being burned in a foreign capital only tells part of the story. There are also freedom- seeking citizens in foreign lands who work with our troops there because they see the American flag as a symbol of liberty.
In a recent column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Trudy Rubin explains how the values represented by the American flag will be put to the test in the weeks after this Flag Day, as our troops complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There are nearly 18,000 visa requests pending for Afghan interpreters and their families and others who have supported our troops. They are now targeted for death by the Taliban. And if the bureaucracy follows its natural course regarding visas, “no more than a small fraction of them can be issued before U.S. troops leave.”
“Many senior U.S. military brass are eager to get the interpreters out, by evacuation if need be. But there still is no concrete plan from the Defense Department,” Rubin wrote. And the State Department, which issues the visas, does not think the “problem is so urgent, timewise.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine Corps Iraq veteran, is leading a bipartisan group that is calling for an immediate evacuation of those who were there for us, rather than wait for the bureaucrats to get it done. They want President Biden to take action now.
“We made them a promise,” as Moulton says. “We know they’re risking their lives for us, and we have their back. That’s America, we don’t leave anyone behind.”
And if we want the world to understand that the American flag still stands for those freedoms that others long for, standing by those who stood by us is the only way to celebrate Flag Day.
