Flag Day, 2022. A reflection on our times.

 

Today is Flag Day for 2022.

The photo above is, of course, Joe Rosenthal's February 23, 1945, photograph of the second flag raising by the Marines on Iwo Jima.

The posting of this here is intentional due to the times we are in.

I don't know the politics of the six men in the photograph, and you like don't either.  The President was a liberal Democrat from the Northeast. The Vice President was a moderate Democrat from what wome would call the Midwest and others the South.  The Senate was somewhat more Democratic than Republican, which it had been throughout the war and the Great Depression.  It had one member who was in the Progressive Party.  The House was 55% Democratic and had one member from the American Labor Party and one member from the Progressive Party. The balance were of course Republicans.

Wyoming's Governor was Lester Hunt, a Democrat who, outside of politics, was a dentist.  I don't know the makeup of the legislature, which would involve some effort to determine, but it had more Republicans than Democrats.  It always has, save for the legislature immediately after the Johnson County War.

The six men who raised the flag that day were Cpl. Harlon Block, PFC Harold Keller, PFC Franklin Sousley, Sgt Michael Strank, PFC Harold Schultz and PFC Ira Hayes.  Block, Sousley and Strank were killed in the war, which had only a few months to run at this time.  Native American Ira Hayes never recovered from his psychological wounds.

The six men depicted here didn't fight for the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party. They fought for the country and its democratic ideals.

The Republican Party, which had distinctly different ideas about how the country should be run than the Democratic Party, didn't spend the war accusing Franklin Roosevelt of illegitimately occupying the office.

Enlistees in the Armed Forces in World War Two took a slightly different oath than the current form, which was adopted in the 1950s.  That oath stated:

I, _____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

The current form states:

 I, ____________________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

The holders of office take a similar oath.

There are a body of Americans today, some of whom have taken that oath, either for military service or political office (some of whom even belong to a group claiming that they "keep" the oath) who are dedicated to its violation.

Half the men in this photo died keeping their oath.  The other didn't really come out of it okay.  Those who would ignore the first principal of democracy, which is democracy itself, do these men, the cause they fought for, and their country, a disservice.