Macy Gray on the American flag: 'I shouldn't have to salute it, I shouldn't have to honor it'

Macy Gray isn't backing down from her controversial stance that the American flag should be redesigned.

The 53-year-old Grammy-winning singer elicited mixed reactions over a Juneteenth op-ed she wrote for MarketWatch that quickly went viral. In the piece, Gray compared the U.S. flag to the Confederate flag, calling it "tattered, dated, divisive and incorrect." She doubled down on her assertion on Monday.

"Why do we have to celebrate a flag that now represents divisiveness and hate?" she declared.

Gray felt the need for change more than ever on Jan. 6, when she watched rioters storm the U.S. Capitol, many of whom carried American flags.

"The people there held it up as their symbol as 'this is what America represents,'" Gray continued. "'We're threatening to hang the vice president and our gang sign is the flag.'"

"I shouldn't have to honor it, I shouldn't have to pledge to it," she explained. "All I'm saying is let's redesign the flag for the rest of us who aren't a part of that tribe."

"The Smithsonian documents that the 'white' stripes represent purity and innocence. America is great. It is beautiful. Pure, it ain’t. It is broken and in pieces," she stated.

The latest change in the American flag was more than 60 years ago, when the new states Alaska and Hawaii were given stars.

"Sixty-two years later, in 2021, we have changed and it’s time for a reset, a transformation. One that represents all states and all of us," Gray concluded.

Things like that really bug me and prompted this essay I post each fall and send to all the important people and institutions in sports.

Kneeling for the National Anthem

As the NFL season begins, I am not about to let your organization forget its commitment to loathing this country and those who have and are serving in the armed forces. The Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Nike and now most pro sports endorse a variety of expressions of contempt, including kneeling when the National Anthem is played.

The Star-Spangled Banner provides the majestic musical/visual symbol of the Constitution I swore to support and defend as a Navy officer. My indefinitely binding oath requires standing for the anthem and kneeling to pray for the country. Veterans understand settling genuine grievances requires revering the essence of our country and trusting in the freedoms it represents. Though most of us have or will reach old age many have gone blind, become deaf or crippled, or suffered death in service to the principles represented by that flag and anthem.

We note that when Armed Forces members make the ultimate sacrifice, they are wrapped in the Star-Spangled Banner for a traditional remembrance of the freedoms found throughout our unique Republic. When America’s fallen arrive at Dover Air Force Base from the Middle East, their caskets are covered with a Star-Spangled Banner. When they are buried the flag is removed, elegantly folded, and given to a spouse, child, sibling, or parent.

We are aware that since the emergence of independent colonies and for all time the Constitution defines Americans as sovereign individuals who find their primary identity in pre-existing, natural, intangible liberties, and not in ethnicity, gender, class, or race, and certainly not in the acquisition of things, or the accumulation of sympathies for dilutional expressions of wounded identity.

The country does not suffer a burden of social injustice prescribing kneeling for the National Anthem, but instead malingers under the burden of virulent mythologies producing within urban black cultures a pestilence of moral distress highlighted by shattered families, indiscriminate abortion, and rampant criminality. Within these cultures blacks re-segregate themselves, embrace a bondage of dependency, and reject Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of a symphony of brotherhood.

These cultures erase role models like Booker T. Washington and Fredrick Douglas. These men promoted cohesive families, education, entrepreneurship, and marketable skills as strongholds of competence for building individual character, for enjoying and promoting personal liberty, and for exalting the human spirit. If similar role models exist today, they have been effectively marginalized in these impoverished communities.

Previously successes for everyone were attainments within marriage, family, career, trade skills, etc. People focused on freedom as they moved through and around the issues now termed insurmountable barriers to social justice. They ignored voices seeking to entangle them and chose instead to hold fast the promise that all are granted an equal opportunity to prosper.

Quang Nguyen who escaped from Vietnam and founded Caddis Branding Agency said, “In 1982, I stood with a thousand new immigrants, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and listening to the National Anthem for the first time as an American. To this day, I can't remember anything sweeter and more patriotic than that moment in my life…..You see, America is not just a place on the map, it isn't just a physical location. It is an ideal, a concept. And if you are an American, you must understand the concept, you must accept this concept, and most importantly, you have to fight and defend this concept. This is about Freedom and not free stuff. And that is why I am standing up here.”

The precedented achievements of Vietnamese were preceded by those of Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, and Japanese descent. Focusing on possibilities for success because of freedom allowed them to avoid the reactions that would lead to criminality and victimhood. Kneeling at playing of the National Anthem, means embracing the cultural deformities arising from multi-generational broken families begetting broken individuals.

In a new world view, success becomes defined around people manipulated into codependent relationships. A fashionable consensus defines success as one group adjusting their behavior to validate the emotional damage others have decided to inflict upon themselves by filtering events through a paranoid screen allowing only perceptions of brutality, prejudgment, and slights to shape their lives. The instigators re-segregate themselves to reside as fragments in a swarm and trade the adulthood and dignity found as individuals for a prestige lacking dreams to pursue or accomplishments to celebrate. The subservient parties refuse to confront their decline in civic courage and reject the classic liberal principles that formed the basis for our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Instead, they choose to indicate their purity by receiving effortless addictive compassion as a drug of choice.

This novel moral superiority only requires fabricating disgust for themselves and for this country. Both parties then shelter within a joyous cacophony of mutually supportive orations validating the miseries of their own making and delighting in any opportunity for escalating their rhetoric into expressions of lawlessness. They allow those apparitions to provide definition and live out their years in prisons of their own creation. I see both parties as feckless and their methods for correcting social injustices as frivolous and squalid.

This theater of delusional relationships proves not only personally futile but provides the opportunity for politicians become patricians to accumulate a useful constituency. As these acolytes and petty bureaucrats shout that there ought to be a law, a political class found at all levels of government stands ready to offer enchanting administrative laws and rules.

Supposedly these initiatives enable equal security and outcomes. Instead, these actions inject patricians and their mandarins with ever greater powers to compel obedience from citizens become subjects and receive the sensual gratification derived from the opportunity to control and order everyone and everything. Now they only need placate the self-proclaimed aristocracy who join their cabal for domination.

All individuals then confront ever narrowing boundaries for exercising inherent spiritual needs for independence and mutually agreed voluntary cooperation and restraint. True compassion, true leadership arises from understanding how very few individuals cannot create, encourage, explore, repair, analyze, develop, build, cooperate, serve and/or teach, and become heroic as they exercise their intangible natural liberties.

Freedom apart from the inherent individual liberties written into our founding documents is a fraud. We should always choose the hazards and uncertainties of personal freedom over Faustian like bargains exchanging the opportunity for growth of the human spirit for illusions of government benevolence.

Dr. Martin Luther King saw preeminence of personal liberties as key to personal sovereignty by saying,” When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men- yes black men as well as white men-would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…..So we’ve come to cash this check; a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice…..Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.”

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…..little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning. ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring’”

This country needs “a new birth of freedom” if we are to keep faith with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the embodiment of the American ideal. Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the blood stream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same”. Now it is our turn.

Partial Bibliography:

The Life and Times of Fredrick Douglass by Fredrick Douglass

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

The Liberal Mind by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/espn-president-wants-less-politics-at-network-it-is-not-our-jobs-to-cover-politics/2018/08/17/6d54c706-a252-11e8-8e87-c869fe70a721_story.html?utm_term=.dfaa5f77d48a

Colin Kaepernick’s Nike Campaign Keeps N.F.L. Anthem Kneeling in Spotlight

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/sports/kaepernick-nike.html

Meaning of the Folding of the American flag

https://www.truthorfiction.com/foldsoftheflag/

Conservative Black American Role Models Are Being Erased from History

https://therevolutionaryact.com/best-black-american-role-models-erased/

Quang Nguyen Director/Founder Caddis Branding Agency

http://caddisad.com/

Vietnam Veterans Appreciation Speech

http://www.armsmart.com/includes/emails/Quang_Nguyen.html

The Case Against Liberal Compassion

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-case-against-liberal-compassion/

What the Jussie Smollett Story Reveals

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/jussie-smollett-story-shows-rise-victimhood-culture/583099/

The History and Danger of Administrative Law

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/history-danger-administrative-law/

Constitution Society: John Locke CHAP. V Of Property.

http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.htm

Property by James Madison

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/property-by-james-madison-march-29-1792.html

NFL kneeling protests based on false claims and misleading media reports

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/10/21/nfl-kneeling-protests-based-on-false-claims-and-misleading-media-reports.html

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