Is the American flag still that beautiful?

It’s the early 80s. You are a very young teacher at a big, old high school in the state’s largest city. Just before you graduated from college, you married your boyfriend. You now have a green card.

You came to the US of A for a liberal arts education. You want to stay - for the music, for the vastness, for the beautiful ideas.

Your students are refugees. They are learning English and how to be American. You know English already, but you, too, are learning how to be American. You are a team.

We use an American History Textbook for new English speakers. It was published in Texas.

One day, my students and I read this sentence aloud together (we are always reading aloud):

THE AMERICAN FLAG IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FLAG IN THE WORLD.

We stop at this sentence because I somehow cannot go on.

At least not without talking about it.

Can Beauty be … a fact?

How do you measure a flag?

I, the teacher, grew up with the yellow cross on the blue field of my homeland - Sweden, a secular yet Lutheran inspired country. The flag reminds me of sailing and deep winters, of berries and dark woods filled with mushrooms and elves.

Then we moved, so I also grew up with the Canadian maple leaf. We kindergarteners were out on a Montreal playground the very day that the British colonial Canadian flag was lowered, the maple leaf rising in its stead. Oh, Canada! This flag reminds me of learning English and French, of maple syrup and snow boots.

The British flag flew in the Hong Kong, B.C.C. of my teen years. It reminds me of taking ferries to islands so far off that they were still in a different century, of water buffalo, and shrimp shacks. Of high rises and expat privileges, like ducking into any hotel bathroom that I wanted, because I was a white girl and that meant it was fine. Nobody would ask me any questions. Mine was the whole pearl of the world in that oyster, any oyster I desired.

The students are mostly flagless, or, at least they have run from their former flags - Afghanistan. Cambodia. Laos. Vietnam. Poland.

Until now. Now they are here and under this one flag.

THE AMERICAN FLAG IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FLAG IN THE WORLD.

They know that it stands for liberty and justice for ALL.

This is a beautiful idea.

This is because these ideas are personal to your students.

They have nearly died for these ideas.

And now they are here. Preparing to be American.

Long into the future (yet quite in the past now), in an entirely different district, M from Afghanistan will appear to speak to the entire 8th grade. This will happen just a few days after 9/11. I was a brand new hire and so impressed that my principal trusted me enough to let M, a Muslim man, speak to what was, back then, a hall full of white kids. M tells the 8th graders, who are (surprisingly enough) truly listening, that the Afghan people are not actually our enemy. M will raise his children to be scholars and athletes. Americans.

P ran alone through jungles as a young girl, eventually reaching Maine as an unaccompanied minor. She was adopted by a single American woman.

In the later 80s, she will learn that her mother is still alive in Cambodia. She will write you a letter about it, when you have left for grad school. In her perfect cursive penmanship she will say: When I look at her picture I cry and I cry. Sometimes no one understand what it would be like if they were in my shoes. It hard to say now, it would be very difficult to explain. You know, I hope to see my family once again, but how….? May be later on, the world change so I might have a chance to see them again.

The world will change.

P will meet her mother once more before the old woman dies. P will stay in Maine and work professionally her entire life, in banking. She will become a grandmother, with a backyard full of chickens and grandchildren.

X was from Poland back when it was behind an Iron Curtain. He was a math wiz. To escape communist Poland, his father went on a business trip. The family was told he had died. They were allowed to go to collect the body. The father was not dead at all.

They were out! And they ended up here.

X was very very quiet but taught me more than math. He was soon in the mainstream classes.

The students were all headed there.

There were so many of them, wave after wave of humans,

all come to look for America…

THE AMERICAN FLAG IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FLAG IN THE WORLD.

We read it again.

We laugh about this sentence.

(We laugh about many things.)

“What if you don’t love red, white and blue the best?” somebody asks.

“What if you don’t like stripes?”

But they love the flag. They do.

It stands for this country. The one they have worked so hard to get to, the one they’ve already risked their lives for….

Those Texan textbook writers seem both wrong and right.

Is the American flag still that beautiful?

We shall see.

Charlotte came to Maine from Sweden, via Hong Kong, for a liberal arts education and the 70s rock n' roll. She's a lifelong public school teacher and the author/illustrator of many books for children and young adults. She believes that artists are emotional first responders and that art gives you questions, not answers. Which is why art is so dangerous and so necessary.