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Two Flags: Memories of November 22 [1]

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Date: 2023-11-22  

I was sitting in a class of third-graders at St. Michael's Elementary School in Memphis (I being one of those third-graders). My memory is of a settled classroom; a classmate was probably reading a passage from one of our story books—middle-class white kids playing sports, having safe adventures, and happily doing chores. As we listened, the scratchy click of the public address speaker broke the narrative, and the voice of the principal came into the room. It had a shakiness to it that seemed unexpected for a Catholic nun running a parochial school. She told us she had some important news, reports that a gunman had attacked and wounded the President. At the front of the room, the face of our teacher, framed by the black cowl of her nun’s habit, looked pale. She took a moment, then had us return to our reading.The lesson I would learn a few minutes later would be different.

I was a little kid in a school where the teachers wore flowing black robes that gave them an other-worldly presence, where nuns spoke in hushed tones about judgment day and burning skin in Hell and students did the same about "going to the Principal's office." (Those images of flowing robes would later remind me of Todd McFarlane's "Spawn"). Our family had a long positive history with the priests of the church; two were old friends of the family and frequent guests at holiday dinners. The nuns, though? Mysterious, shrouded women who lived behinds the walls of a convent, sweeping children into orderly groups and taking no backtalk. There was no hint of vulnerability in a nun, even the kindlier ones whose black habits would offer a billowing refuge from playground bullies.

Another ten minutes passed. The PA speaker again cracked through the quiet and the principal's voice returned. Instead of announcing further news, she could barely sob out the words, "Please pray for the soul of our President—" and I doubt anyone heard the rest, because the stone-faced nun at the front of our class broke down at her desk and for the first time in my life, I knew what grief looked like.

The happy world of the fictional Bobbsey Twins had cracked into "before"and "after." There was no going back. The entire school headed across the campus to the new parish church that had opened a year before. To a child, it was massive, its cavernous stone interior topped with a coffered wood ceiling forty feet above, the beige walls punctured by deeply colored stained glass windows.

My class must have been one of the first to reach the building, because the nuns seated us in the front rows where someone, perhaps the principal, began a rosary—that repetitive, droning prayer cycle of ten "Hail Marys" punctuated by "Our Fathers." It can center a person needing mental or spiritual focus but, for me, it eventually represented the most onerous, ritualistic and least interesting part of Catholic practices—a thing invented during the Middle Ages to keep people busy and uncurious, lest they learn to read. Rather than ground my thoughts, it made my mind take flight. However, it served its more essential purpose that day for those gathered in the sanctuary.

Minutes passed, and we were well into the cycle, moving our thumb and forefinger from one bead on the rosary strand to the next. My mind wandered; I glanced towards the chancel area, with its wide steps leading from the transept to the altar. On the right stood the yellow and white flag of the church and on the left, the U.S. flag. Both stood upright in their floor stands next to the stone walls.

As I watched, the U.S. flag teetered, then fell over, the impact of the pole echoing through the sanctuary. I stared at the sight, hardly the only one doing so. A few minutes later, a priest appeared from the side and set the flag back in place. The decades of the rosary continued their slow rhythm without pause.

I'm not one to get hung up in non-rational explanations for things, but you can imagine how that image has stuck in my mind ever since. That is especially true as the following years showed conclusively that our country (and the church) had been making some big mistakes, terrible mistakes that were not just problems in themselves but led to other problems for which reporters and historians had coined a new word: "blowback."

There are many people, including myself, who fight the feeling that the U.S. seems to have gone downhill since the Kennedy assassination, and it wasn't because, as a Catholic kid, we thought he was "our" president. History reveals Kennedy as not the king of a new Camelot, but just another talented human being—one whose personal luck ran to two extremes involving his birth and his death. Yet, he was one who outpaced his flaws long enough to make a difference in the world well past his death. The assassination occurred with the U.S. at the height of its power and influence. Just as important, it was at the height of the middle class that had thrived in the post-war years of development. A people whose conception of a shining “city on ahill” was evolving to include races other than the white one.

Though we’ve made tremendous strides in social justice since then, a question still gnaws at my generation's self-conception: Was that "it"? Did that terrible day mark the beginning of America's decline? Kennedy was followed into death by another Kennedy and then Martin Luther King. We experienced a dawning "WTF?" about Vietnam, with Watergate and Iran-Contra soon following. It all made us more defensive, a little more cynical, even as we strove to prove our power on the world stage. Now some are returning to blind nationalism and embracing scorched earth politics of hate.

Let me give you a hint about where we should be going. Think of the flag that fell over in my church, the one that felt like an omen. Six years and eight months after that day, a guy from the United States planted a twin of that flag—on the moon. The U.S. government poured money into a partnership between itself and private business to invent the technology needed to do that. That made the integrated circuit commercially viable, jump-starting the microcomputer industry. NASA's biological research led to a slew of advances in medical technology. The new advances in computers led to just as revolutionary downstream changes in other industries. All this flowed from Kennedy's push to go to the moon. He was a philanderer who had let himself get talked into the Bay of Pigs fiasco and who failed to see Vietnam as another tar pit left by prehistoric colonialism. Yet he was also the person who told us we should continue to believe in something—a thing for which those immigrating to this melting pot had always set a shining example:

When we set ourselves to it, we can take ourselves to places our fathers only imagined.

That attitude—of believing we CAN accomplish things—produced an exponential amount of economic activity and scientific advances, benefits that were completely out of proportion to the symbolic goal of putting a man on the moon. Correction: Out of proportion to what was "obviously" the insane, wasteful expense of shooting tax dollars at the Moon.

We now live in a country where too many folks measure success in politics by what they doggedly prevent other people from doing, not what they can help accomplish. That includes reversing some of the social justice that we have attained. Is this the country we want? Which of those two flags now represents this country: the one that lay on the floor surrounded by sounds of weeping, or the one still standing in the Moon's silent vacuum, where no sound is needed to explain its simple meaning: We did this.

When I think of Kennedy, I know which flag I want to accompany his memory.

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