Explore the wild symbolism and controversies as a teacher reflects on the American flag. The tumultuous events of Woodstock, the Capitol riots, and the strange act of a Supreme Court justice all trigger the importance of history education in understanding our nation’s and our school’s identity. Get some coffee and settle in for a 20-minute experience that our staff calls “exquisite.”
1.
I learned about the American flag in Ogden, Utah, and that learning made for a real, 60s period piece. It goes like this:
I did not go to Woodstock. I was inclined to, having gone to college during the Kent State atrocities. That was four students shot by the National Guard ordered onto campus by the governor of Ohio. But Nixon, who had escalated the Vietnam war, was in the full crosshairs of all of our blame. After all that college political trauma, Woodstock seemed like a place to express freedom again. But for me, as the festival approached, it seemed too popular, and I was never one to go along with the crowds.
As a tip off that this column about flags is going to be controversial, I will say right up front that when I heard about the Israeli Supernova Sukkot Gathering bombed by Hamas, the image that came immediately to my mind was Woodstock. Many there were avid fans not of rock music, but of electronic dance music, particularly trance, and were regular attendees of similar festivals around the world. The crowd was a mix of different ethnicities and nationalities, unified by their passion for music and dancing and the festival experience. It of course became the site of documented slaughter, rape, kidnapping, and point-blank murder resulting in a level of trauma, horror and rage such as I have never seen. The aftermath is being experienced and interpreted by not only the festival-goers: the whole world is searching for ways out of the insanity and only getting deeper in.
There were plenty of flags flying at the Supernova gathering, as flag flying is a common festival activity around the world. Music festivals, especially those centered around electronic dance music and rave culture, often feature flags and banners as part of their expressive atmosphere. Attendees commonly bring flags representing their countries, favorite artists, or personal messages to add to the festive environment and show their identity or group affiliation. I mention this because the American Flag was in the news this past week.
It turns out that a Supreme Court Justice of the United States had old glory flying upside-down, outside his own home for a few days during 2020, immediately following the January 6, 2020, “Capitol insurrection.”
It was there in DC that around 2000 people breached the perimeter of our nation’s Capitol building, many carrying firearms, knives, chemical sprays, and various improvised weapons, including flagpoles.
800 of them entered the Capitol building where our Presidential election was being certified. In their attempt to keep people out, over 140 law enforcement officers were injured. One rioter and one policeman were killed. Following the event four police officers died by suicide: Jeffrey Smith, Howard Liebengood, Gunther Hashida, and Kyle DeFreytag, and so they are unable to submit to history that this was not a peaceful protest, as the MAGA and even a few at the fringe of the “Christian right” media claim.
When a Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag in distress over the capitol riots, it would have been be easy to assume he was upset about what happened to those police officers and to our democratic election. After all, those officers defended and protected our represented officials inside the Capitol, doing their jobs, hiding in terror. But that assumption would be wildly wrong.
So what was all this distress the flag was signaling? As it turns out, the Supreme Court Justice is a part of a movement in the US that believes that our country is based on his religion. This movement, called MAGA, uses religion to band together for the explicit purpose of defeating other groups, i.e., political groups they hate. Their religion is or at least incorporates hate and vitriol.
One of the people they hate most is someone who has spent a lifetime in service attempting to exemplify the same religion they espouse: the current, actually-elected president. This turns out to be the cause of the Justice’s distress.
2.
Hamas terrorists breached the perimeters of the music festival in Israel, and they were carrying deadly weapons. The majority of the attendees inside the festival were obviously not Senators or Congressional representatives. They were in their 20s and 30s, and there were also reports of some high school students. As those events were unfolding in our news media, I horribly imagined all the teachers and students at Grauer who have many times “played hooky” (skipped school) in order to attend the Coachella Music festival, where flags also fly from time to time. We have never begrudged our students going because the point of great festivals is the point of great schools: they are there for liberation and the search for peace, not control or the use of force. To me, that was the Woodstock message. It is also why we fly the flag at our school.
In fact, the first purchase I ever made as a school founder was this: the American flag. It was the first flag I remember ever purchasing. I screwed the pole into the stucco in front of the suite I was borrowing, at Rincon Plaza. To this day, I am stunned with gratitude that we can educate our children as we see fit, in accordance with our nation’s core values.
3.
So, though I did not attend Woodstock, a year or two later I did have occasion to go to a rock festival on some rolling farmland up in Oregon where a few flags were flown and brown rice was served for all. I had driven there from the East Coast, but just sold my car. So I stuck out my thumb. A fellow in granny glasses and canvas coveralls picked me up in his VW microbus, and we headed out. In retrospect, if you look up the word “hippy” in the dictionary, you could easily get the picture of him.
I would not have called myself a hippy — I identified more as an observer, something like a sociologist.
He had been to Woodstock, he was hitting all the big festivals, and I don’t remember where he was heading next. But once we hit Ogden, Utah, we pulled into a gas station for fuel and two policemen approached the car. They questioned us all, and then arrested the hippy driver.
The reason the hippy was arrested by the police at the Ogden gas station was simple: for curtains covering the windows in his classic VW microbus, he had draped his American flags, one on each side of the vehicle. When the police asked him why he was doing that, he told the truth: he liked to bring them to rock festivals where he flew them.
4.
As part of our third school groundbreaking, we created our Tolerance Gateway, formally named The Gottleib Family Tolerance Gateway, where students and faculty enter and depart each day. The gateway is one of humankind’s most iconic archetypes. As Carl Jung once said, ‘Symbols are the language of the soul.’ This gateway, crowned with our flag, is a daily reminder of our values and identity.”
As probably only my partner in development David Meyer will remember, an early proposal for the development of our site located the trash dumpsters right at the site of our entry gateway. I’m not even going to make a metaphor out of this.
Instead, we moved the dumpsters out of the way and installed a flagpole there. Now, at the start of every day as we move through the gateway, our student color guard can be found raising the flag.
The school flag installation was done in reference to an old, respectful archetype. Ancient tribes and armies often used banners and flags as rallying points and symbols of collective identity, or sometimes they were used to mark sacred spaces or communicate with the spiritual realm. The native totem poles up north served/serve similar purposes, representing the identity, history, and spiritual beliefs of a community. The flagpole itself can symbolize stability and steadfastness, grounding the flag (which can be seen as more dynamic and changing) and providing a stable center. In sum, we replaced our dumpsters with the flag and flagpole as a nod to ancient archetypes of identity, power, spirituality, and stability.
As at almost any school, the flag is our daily reminder of the core values of the United States, including liberty, justice, and equality, and our respect, connection and commitment to the greater community. Hence, the flag is part of our mission.
5.
A national flag is a staunch reminder of allegiance to something shared. It is lowered to half-mast when we mourn together. It is used to unite us. I have only seen it used differently once.
I was up on the Lakota reservation, we rode up to that hill of the Wounded Knee Cemetery. I looked down to the only building, the memorial building and there, outside, flew the American flag upside down. Later on, I looked it up and learned what seemed obvious: that it signified distress. Without being controversial, even the quickest possible study will tell you that if any people on the planet have a case for expressing distress, it is the Lakota. If you study it going back enough, you find that their suffering has been literally at the level of Auschwitz survivors. The atrocities that occurred at this very site (and elsewhere) to our Native brothers and sister are beyond dispute (or comprehension).
As it turned out, after the 2020 presidential election, some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office of President. Most leaders and many within the broader conservative community condemned the election violence, but there developed and remains a subset that seeks to frame the event as some kind of normal event, often as a reaction to perceived political persecution. To them, it is important to maintain a negative narrative about their political opponents. Some of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.
Back at Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol was also on display. So it turns out that an upside-down flag, as adopted by Trump supporters, was flown as a way of contesting his loss of the election. It was flying over the justice’s front lawn. The distress flag on Alito’s lawn was in sympathy to the Capitol rioters.
Did I mention this is a Supreme court justice of the United States? Did I mention the over 60 court cases across our country have all shown that our election was fair, not rigged, and that the winner was Joe Biden. Can this history be forgotten so quickly? Reuters news service, for instance, also provided a detailed analysis of the court cases, showing that judges across the political spectrum found no merit in the claims of a rigged election.
If you are not aghast at this behavior of a US Supreme Court justice, we have a problem. But, either way, there is a big problem.
“Justice” Alito claimed that his wife was in a dispute with a neighbor. The Alito’s claimed that the neighbor’s nasty anti-Trump sign was too close to the bus stop where kids gathered every day. Here’s something: This was during the pandemic. The kids were not going to school or on any bus.
Here is something much bigger, that every history teacher will tell you: People forget history and how big a job we have as teachers to teach history. It is easy to distort history if you don’t check your sources. It seems even easier to create whole, distorted narratives that people are happy to believe. We need history education, big time. Thank a history teacher today. If you can find one.
Today, the state of history education in schools and the availability of history teachers is a topic of dismay among educators and policymakers. The emphasis on standardized testing in subjects like math and English has led to a de-prioritization of history. There is a growing shortage of qualified teachers. There is a hailstorm of crazy media bombarding our kids and their parents which conveys crazy history. Much of it comes in colorful and ill-informed but persuasive deliveries through social media platforms.
Meanwhile, experienced history teachers are leaving the profession at higher rates, and fewer new teachers are entering the field to replace them. There is substantial evidence ( National Education Association, RAND Corporation in 2022, and many others) indicating that history teachers are experiencing anxiety and fear of backlash over how they approach controversial topics. This issue has significant implications for the quality of history education and the ability of teachers to engage students in meaningful and critical discussions about the past.1
[1 — School districts, in response to community pressures, have altered or removed certain curricular materials, further impacting teachers’ ability to provide a full and accurate account of historical events. Several states in the U.S. have enacted laws or proposed bills aimed at restricting the teaching of certain topics in history and social studies, particularly those related to systemic racism, indigenous, Civil Rights Movement, gender identity, and LGBTQ+ issues. For example, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” and similar legislation in other states have led teachers to feel uncertain and fearful about covering certain historical events and social issues in their curriculum.]
Many teachers and parents watching this happen, like me, are hoping that our students can find a way to process what they need to make decisions in a history-starved world: the flag and its meaning, the history of peaceful transfer of power in the US, the expression of freedom (through music and festivals) in free countries, the horror and the pain of wars often caused by terrible misunderstandings of history.
It is all swirling around. For students, why not just take STEM classes? That’s where the smart money’s going. Isn’t it?
6.
A week ago, 40 students at our nearby UC San Diego (UCSD) were arrested for protesting against Israel, a protest that seemed easy to understand given all the killing. So, I got up very early the next morning and rode my bicycle through the UCSD campus, talking to students. Here is what I learned when I asked questions about this conflict: None of the ones I spoke to understood what was going on. Few cared, but all wanted to get a good education. What I learned from these students around UCSD, ranked variously at 21st among all U.S. universities and 34th globally, did not look or feel at all what I saw on the nightly news.
On the news, students wanted the university to divest its holdings in war stocks, but none I talked to understood what endowment investment was, much less divestment. This is not a criticism, only an observation.
One-third of the millennials in the country do not know what Auschwitz was. They are heading to STEM.
Some I spoke to marched or protested because they were curious or intrigued, and the marching seemed alluring. I say this in no disrespect, and I was exactly that way in college. I trust some had deeper understandings of global politics and culture, but I left UCSD fearful that most of the students who used to study history now take STEM courses, instead. For the smart money. All research I can find supports this fear overwhelmingly.
Judging the Israeli reaction to these recent events without understanding the reality of Auschwitz and the Shoah would be like trying to understand the depth of an ocean by merely looking at a puddle. The trauma and historical significance of Auschwitz and the Shoah are profoundly ingrained in the collective memory and identity of the Jewish people. This context shapes their perceptions, reactions, and policies, especially in matters of security and existential threats. Without appreciating this historical backdrop, along with the equally critical ocean of the Palestinians (notwithstanding Hamas’s terror), one might miss the deeply rooted fears and motivations driving both of their responses to contemporary events. I fear our collective understandings, at least as I hear them expressed, are at the puddle level — including among intelligent, caring people who lack information or schooling. If you don’t agree with me at first, ask yourself only this:
“What great- and open-hearted questions have I heard? When have I experienced or observed great listening?
Emanuel and Küçük, on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, noted this week: “Historically, students arriving on American college campuses spent a majority of their first two years taking classes outside their projected majors. This exposed them to a common curriculum that had them engage with thoughtful writings of the past to develop the skills and capacity to form sound, independent judgments.2” No more.
Trends at UCSD mirror if not lead nationwide indicators of the growing emphasis on STEM fields compared to humanities and social sciences, including history. Only a small handful are equipping themselves to understand what is happening in the middle east, a conflict of complexity that can even overwhelm professional scholars and policy makers.
[2 — https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/opinion/college-university-liberal-arts-democracy.html]
7.
Right after Kent State, in 1970, I, was an observer as students threw bricks through windows of my university administration building and then occupied it. I was a passive, not-particularly-scholarly observer of this.
Today, I am a teacher and a scholar and not an activist in particular. I’ve read the history of the US many times and ways. In this observer role, I want to tie this swirl of historical ignorance back to the much earlier roots of events like the Supernova Sukkot Gathering attack and its terrible aftermath, spreading horror across Gaza. I want to connect that event to the January 6 Capitol riot and the violence, to the Kent State massacres when I was in college, to the Vietnam War protests, to Woodstock where we “let our freak flags fly,” and straight back to Auschwitz. That is a ton of synthesizing but here is the point: we keep exterminating one another in the name of our flags.
Now I am finding it almost impossible to be a teacher and a scholar while not being an activist. It has taken me 50 years, but I want to fly my freak flag high.
If you do not understand every one of these histories, you may not have an easy time seeing the whole of what is occurring in our world, the extreme limits on what our college students can know right now despite their high intelligences, the constant distortion of the news we all get, or the insanity of a Supreme Court Justice flying a distress flag as a way of installing an unelected president — that is not just an unelected president, either, but a public figure with public distain for our democratic institutions, who has been subject of over 3,500 lawsuits totaling over $543 million in fines and growing, who openly courts autocrats, whose followers openly promote establishing a “reich” (presumably the fourth) in the name of our flag, and who has not so much as gone to jail in Ogden.
And I understand that, in some states of the union, concluding all of the above would get me fired from jobs if not arrested in Ogden.
I understand that I have been fortunate to study history in universities and as an independent scholar. Tying all this together might not be easy for the layman. It may look more like a maelstrom than a whole. All of the above, this is my Guernica — diverse historical elements all combined into a unified art piece.
In my early lifetime, maelstrom of this magnitude was expressed most poignantly during one of the most iconic moments at Woodstock, which, as I say, I declined to attend. That moment was when Jimi Hendrix performed the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem, on his guitar in a heavy metal, distorted, impressionistic way. Of course, the performance seemed like a part of the protests that kept coming out of that Vietnam era. Hendrix was flying a musical distress flag that hardly a student in American failed to hear.
Relating diverse events, connecting dots, can be overwhelming but is the way we can achieve a larger understanding. The intellectual skill here is called “synthesis,” and it is the opposite of analysis, which is unfortunately much favored in schools and by standardized test creators. Analysis is breaking things into parts (or categories). Synthesis is putting them together, interrelating them, however diverse they are so that we can create new meaning.
Synthesis is the root of creativity. When we experience great art or great scholarship, this is often what we are experiencing. When we can’t do this synthesizing, we can get overwhelmed, or else we can just check out.
8.
As a school head of many years, I have been aware of my role in scholarship, and also as a community leader who needs to somehow stay above politics. I have never allowed any political poster or advertisement on our school property. I have taken down many. Nor have I allowed any political signage in front of my own home because I understand my role is academic, and that I must appear to stay above the politics or I risked my job. Even as a young school founder, I understood this implicitly.
The idea that a US Supreme Court Justice raised a US flag in the distress position from his own home, is impossible to ignore — it is impossible that he did not know what he was doing. If you don’t immediately see this, try imagining if I had hung the US flag in distress at The Grauer School and then, when called out by rational school families, merely said that my secretary did it because she was in a fight with someone.
The judge knew exactly what he was doing. The idea that he did so in support of a riot that terrorized our elected officials, ties directly to the ultimate deaths of their guards, and was meant to subvert our peaceful transfer of power for the first time since the American Revolution, is horrifying. But how are college students supposed to know this?
Advocating for comprehensive history education is not merely a self-serving endeavor. History education encompasses significant past events and the rich, dynamic conversations that inspire a deeper understanding of humanity. These discussions foster critical thinking, empathy, and civic engagement, continuing to influence students even after they leave the classroom. For those who perceive this advocacy as a political statement rather than a historical necessity, the famous advice of Rabbi Hillel is apt:
“Go and study.”
When we fail to study history, we can end up with self-serving or politically driven viewpoints rather than the ability to view the whole of things: the way to peace. I want my students to love synthesis. Peace is when we make things whole again. There you go, love and peace.
9.
At our school, we have had our flagpole for over 25 years and I have trained our student color guard on their first day of school, every single year. Please pause for a moment the next time you walk past our school flag (or your own school flag), the one we pass by every single time we enter and depart from our campus, and that we hope to never, ever hang upside down.
Alito was correct to hang his flag in distress position, but he will never understand the insane irony of why: His flag was aiding and abetting the very distress it was signifying.
10.
It did not seem like a protest what that hippy was doing with the flag in his VW microbus all those 50 years ago. At the time, he just seemed like a patriot. Did you know there were hippy patriots? Also at the time, I did not know that the next year I would enroll in a program to get a master’s degree in history education, nor have I ever known why I did that. It would be like I was watching myself enroll.
Back there at the Ogden gas station I asked the hippy if he wanted me to go with him to the jailhouse, though I hardly knew him, but he did not. He said it would all work out, as though he were used to this. So I waited for the police to take him away, then stuck my thumb out, and before long a farmer in a flatbed truck pulled over and he let me and a couple other hitchers hop on the bed of dirty straw where the farm animals normally travelled, and we rolled out of this town, wide open and rural the way it was back then, across the long, flat plains of wheat and barley on my way across America, feeling like hoboes.
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