We All Carry the Same Flag

Lisa and Lucy, June 14.

Bryan family

We all carry the same flag for the same reason.”

On July 4, the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress (after everyone signed it July 2). More than usual on this Fourth, we will honor the nation’s history, celebrate community contributions, and look to the future.

Americans have been through much in the last year. There is the war in Iran, rising inflation, fuel, and food prices, ICE raids that have divided the country, and ugly arguments in Congress about voting, immigration enforcement, the military budget, and, as always, the Epstein files.

But every generation has wrestled with questions of justice, representation, freedom, and responsibility. We inherited those debates, and we will pass them on.

On the Key Peninsula, we have had our own struggles and some wins, too.

We’ve come through some terribly violent tragedies since December. It’s hard to find someone untouched by them. The ensuing debate about long emergency response times led to talk of the KP seceding from Pierce County to take care of ourselves, as we so often do anyway. It’s why you see your neighbors picking up trash along the roadside, tending to flowers in public spaces, or cleaning up the Purdy Spit.

I have attended some of the No Kings protests and counter-protests in Key Center in recent weeks to listen to people and snap photos. I did the same thing at the No Mask-No Vaccine Mandate protests during the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago. I’ve been told that such displays should be discouraged, and that reporting or opining on them is divisive and potentially dangerous.

But I think they unite us, because the issues before us are bigger than our opinions about them.

What I’ve seen is neighbors coming together to talk, even when they argue. People engaged in public or private debate are not a threat. They are a resource. That is why we have a First Amendment.

We all carry the same flag for the same reason.

Most people on the KP are not looking for a fight. We are looking for a way to be heard. Whether we are holding signs on a street corner, attending a fire district meeting, volunteering at a school event, or helping a neighbor clear a fallen tree after a storm, we are participating in the same American tradition. We are showing up.

That matters more than we sometimes realize. The loudest voices often get the most attention, especially online, where outrage is rewarded, and compromise is treated as weakness. But communities are built in quieter ways. They are built through conversations at coffee stands, grocery stores, church parking lots, and kitchen tables. They are built when people remember they are neighbors, even after a disagreement.

The challenge is to keep disagreement from becoming contempt. Once we stop seeing each other as human beings with the same, unalienable rights, we begin losing the very thing that makes self-government possible.

A community cannot solve problems if its members refuse to cooperate, and it cannot thrive if people decide participation is pointless.

That is why local involvement matters. It reminds us that we have more influence than we think. The future is not shaped only in Washington, D.C., Olympia, or county offices. It is shaped here, at home, where ordinary people decide every day whether we will contribute to the common good or leave it to someone else.

I missed the last protest in Key Center June 14 because I had something more important to do. I was meeting my new great-granddaughter, Lucy, just 10 days old.

I cannot now remember being as happy as I was then. I could not have thought of doing, feeling, or being any thing else if I tried, which I didn't. 

Elated as my husband and I were, on the long drive home, I let the world seep back in.

I have made a habit of keeping the news at a distance for at least a few minutes or even up to an hour a day, odd as that sounds from a newspaper editor. It’s the only way I can break it down into manageable pieces. I know many people who no longer even go that far and have just tuned out whatever they hear, whatever the source. It’s a treacherous landscape of fact, fiction, and manipulation populated by good journalists, bad actors, and an army of AI robots.

But when I held baby Lucy for hours and hours, that terrain collapsed beneath us. Last month, I wrote a bit about skydiving. It was like that: everything was so small, even as I was falling toward it. I knew I would land, I knew I would walk through it, I knew it would seem insurmountable again. But it’s not. All we have to do is care about something bigger than our opinions.

Associate Editor Ted Olinger contributed to this column.

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