A flag’s importance to a country isn’t nearly as great as a flag’s importance to a nation; a country is a physical piece of land, with borders and a (relatively) defined place on the globe. A nation, however, represents a group of people, brought together and bound by common interests. A nation is not bound by land or position, it can move and grow independent of lines on a map. A flag, then, becomes a visual declaration of one’s identification with a nation’s ideology; you are claiming “citizenry” of a nation through it’s display.
For anyone that’s visited the south-eastern United States, you can see evidence of this slapped on the back bumper of countless pick-up trucks. The jack of the Confederate States of America is still a very prevalent symbol in the Old South. And, despite what some southerners might try to convince you of, there is no country called the Confederate States of America (sorry guys, if the south hasn’t risen in the past 140 years, it’s probably not going to happen). Almost a century and a half ago, a group of people, bound by their common belief in an ideal, broke away from a larger conglomerate, and for five years their national identity was symbolized by what has become in recent days a controversial, yet still invoking, flag.
I think for certain nations, flags invoke such a strong emotional response because the ideology of the nation, the group of like-minded people, has become intertwined with the symbol. Of course, a flag is simply composed of colored thread, woven together into a heavy fabric, with a few eyelets poked in the side so you can hang it on something. Just like any religious scripture is just black ink pressed on a sheet of processed wood chips, a temple is just a building of wood and stone, a family crest is just a painted picture. It’s when a person or a group of people ascribe to those things a meaning that goes deeper than its mere physical composition, that the thing stops being an object, and becomes an icon.
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