This Flag Offends Me

I look at this flag and see within it the flag of a nation that oppressed my mother’s people from the Middle Ages until the first part of the 20th Century. A nation that forbid primogeniture to my mother’s people which, when combined with their callousness, led to over a million dead men, women, and children from starvation. This, while my ancestors’ homeland was a net exporter of grain and other foodstuffs. While that nation didn’t consider it a genocide, many of my mother’s people most certainly did.

It is also the flag of the nation that my father’s people fought to gain their freedom. Their independence, if you will.

My mother’s people came from County Cavan, Ireland while parts of my father’s people were in America before the Revolution.

That nation that oppressed my mother’s people and with which my father’s people fought in a revolution is of course Great Britain.

The flag to which I refer is the state flag of Hawaii which celebrates its friendship with the British with the Union Jack in its upper left corner.

If the social justice warriors are really serious about getting rid of any symbol that smacks of oppression, I demand then that they get rid of the flag of Hawaii.

It is also the flag of the state where the President was (probably, possibly, potentially) born. Given his goal to out-Nixon, Nixon, I see it doubly as a symbol of oppression.

I won’t go so far as to demand that the graves of famous Hawaiians be dug up but that flag has to go.