Pictures Of Flags Worth Millions Of Words
Not only are images important but we're all getting more conscious about the ones we project – and more sophisticated in orchestrating them. Organizers of the rallies where hundreds of thousands gathered to support legislation to provide a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants certainly had it figured out yesterday. A quick glance of the coverage shows crowds simply saturated by American flags, small and large, waving above the banners and speakers. The Fourth of July doesn't see as many stars and stripes as the protests provided.
That might be due to something that happened during similar demonstrations last month, where some 500,000 took to the streets of Los Angeles, many waving the flag of Mexico or other native country of the protestors. In some instances, the foreign flag occupied a spot above the American flag, some pictures showed the U.S. flag being displayed upside-down. Those images threatened to undermine the changes these rallies sought. The Los Angeles Times described the crux of the issue:
The Mexican flag has long been an issue in the immigration debate. For some, it represents pride and unity among Mexicans and Mexican Americans fighting for their rights. For others, it symbolizes an invasion of the United States by Mexicans.The tension over these symbols began to spread to the point where even some high schools put a temporary ban on displaying any flag at all. If the argument came down to the question of flags, it wasn't one those taking to the streets were going to win. So when even greater numbers marched yesterday, it was the American flag that carried the day. Why? The Washington Post's David Montgomery explains:
On the Mall yesterday, most of the hundreds of thousands of Hispanics who rallied for immigrant rights had gotten the memo from organizers. Which flag to carry? The correct answer, they were told: the Star-Spangled Banner. American flags outnumbered rivals by thousands to one. CASA of Maryland, one of the organizing groups, had ordered nearly 11,000 U.S. flags (from a supplier in El Salvador).The article runs through some of the cultural reasons immigrants might want to display the flag of their native land, many quite understandable. After all, it's not unusual to see the flag of Italy, Ireland or other European country displayed on occasion. But when hundreds of thousands of people gather, having all those (presumably) non-citizens waving the American flag, the images say more than a thousand speeches they may have heard.