This is a piece I wrote for a Creative Writing class at UIS. A copy of the text version is below the picture. Here’s a closer look at that picture I included in the video:
The first time I became politically active was when president George H. W. Bush sent our troops to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. I believed the war was about oil and that we shouldn’t get involved. The war crystallized my views as a pacifist.
As a member of my Junior High School’s newspaper staff I began reporting on the war. Often my stories had to be shortened to a quarter of my original submissions.
With my mother, I attended Quaker peace vigils in the plainly adorned and dimly lit meetinghouse. While I consider myself a humanist, I embrace some of the traditions of Quakerism including not worshiping idols, direct connections to the divine, and pacifism.
As the war went on I attended nighttime protests in Providence that enveloped us in darkness. I began wearing a pin that said “No Blood for Oil.”
In the Gulf War of the early ‘90s it was common for people to have yellow ribbons to support troops. Giant bows of yellow would be tied around trees. People would wear yellow ribbon pins. There were also, of course, yellow ribbon bumper stickers. To me, the yellow ribbons were about wishing our troops would come home safely. I bought a pin that had a tiny US flag with a yellow bow under it which I began to wear. It was my way of showing I wished for the safe return of our troops.
I was deeply involved in scouting. I was a year or two away from attaining the rank of Eagle Scout during the war. My troop decided to attend a yellow ribbon rally in Providence, a few blocks from where the protests had been. I was excited to go, as I wanted to be with my peers showing my support of the troops. The sun was brightly shining as we assembled to hear several speeches. Near the end a speaker lambasted the protests that I had taken part in only a handful of blocks away. He carried with him a large American flag. He spoke of how the protesters cared not for the safety of our troops. I stared at that flag with its red, white, and blue. I see no incongruity with wearing a “No Blood for Oil” pin and a yellow ribbon as I support the troops, not the president who sent them nor his policies. To me that flag of red and white stripes, the field of blue, and its now fifty white stars, had been a promise of liberty and freedom.
Some of my ancestors came to the Americas on the Mayflower. Two of my ancestors, Mary and William Dyer, had gone with their fellow Quakers to Roger Williams to seek refuge from the religious persecution of Massachusetts Bay Colony and on Williams’ suggestion paid the indigenous people of Aquidneck island for their land. Williams had similarly purchased Providence from the Narragansett Sachems. The Quakers went on to found Portsmouth and later Newport. Williams, a baptist theologian, wrote in his diary that he was pleased he was able to help secure a safe home for the Quakers though he was sad because he believed they would go to hell when they died. Mary Dyer returned to Boston to become the last Quaker hung in the Boston Common.
While Williams and my ancestors paid for their land, King Philip’s war led the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony to commit The Great Swamp Massacre in what is now South Kingstown Rhode Island. In the 1700s the colonists continued to encroach on their land and the hogs they brought began diminishing the food supply that had sustained them for thousands of years. In the 1800s the Narragansetts were illegally “detribalized.” We continue to build on stolen land where slavery reigned for hundreds of years. While many Quakers were abolitionists it wasn’t until 1787 it became a requirement of the faith that Quakers not own slaves. I cannot find evidence that the Dyer family owned slaves, it is possible, especially since Newport was a major hub for the slave trade.
The flag felt like progress with new stars being added as recently as my parents’ lifetime. We had abolished slavery and segregation. Yet here we are, still acting on imperialist instincts. George Bush’s son signed into law the “Patriot Act” that took away the constitutional right of due process from immigrants. It also increased surveillance of our nation. The spying provisions were extended by a law Obama signed in 2011.
Despite being a nation of immigrants, we arrest and turn back the immigrants of today. We have aided the colonial nation of Isreal in it’s genocide of Palestinians. From that yellow ribbon rally on I’ve seen the red as representing the blood that flag truly represents. I’ve realized that it is near impossible to have freedom and liberty in a nation built upon lies. I’ve realized that the American flag is not for me and I see no way to truly reclaim it.
