THESE TIMES

Flagpoles: Half-staff, full-staff, super-staff

Kirk Ericson | Dec 28, 20230

The flagpole outside the PUD 3 building on Cota Street in Shelton is catty-corner (or is it kitty-corner?) to the Journal’s office, and our view from the newsroom gives us a wide view of that skinny pole. Several months ago, the flag went away.

But that’s not what this is about.

When the flag was at half-staff, we’d often wonder why that was so, and sometimes I’d go to the Governor’s Office website to dispel our wonder. If you type in “Washington Governor’s Office flag display,” then scroll to “directives issued by Gov. Inslee,” you’ll find a list of all governor-ordered flag-lowerings dating to Jan. 5, 2019. On that day, the flag was lowered to acknowledge the death of East Olympia volunteer Fire Captain John Ostergard, who died at the scene of a Dec. 14 structure fire south of Yelm.

You get a picture of our nation by going through the flag-lowering list. The flag’s been ordered lowered nearly 90 times in the past five years. It was lowered 11 times to mark 12 mass shootings. It was at half-staff Aug. 5, 2019, to mark two mass shootings that happened on back-to-back days: The shooting in El Paso, Texas, where a man with an AK-47 killed 22 people Aug. 3, and the shooting in Dayton, Ohio, where a man with an AR-15-style pistol killed nine people Aug. 4. We lower it when firefighters, and police and prison officers, and Washington soldiers die on the job.

We lower it for dead people who did good work for our nation and state, including Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, state Supreme Court Justice Mary Fairhurst, first lady Rosalynn Carter, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and U.S. Rep. John Lewis.

We lower it for deaths that happen beyond our borders, including the Oct. 7 attack in Israel by members of Hamas, and the deaths of U.S. soldiers and many others in the Aug. 21, 2021, attack in Kabul during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

On Feb. 22, 2021, the flag was lowered to mark the deaths in the U.S. from COVID (nearly 500,000 at that point). On Jan. 6, 2022, we lowered the flag to remember the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

We mark death with our flag. What we don’t mark are reasons for our nation to celebrate. We mourn, we don’t rejoice, yet both emotions are key to the full functioning of humans.

I’ve been tinkering recently with the idea that we could use our flagpoles to mark our triumphs. Specifically, the practicalities of it and exactly what national and international moments are worth celebrating.

First, the practical matter: How do we raise a flag above its maximum height on a flag pole (let’s call it super-staff).

I don’t know.

Maybe we could insert a short section of pole at the pole’s base that could be maneuvered to emerge from the top of the pole, and then we figure out a way to connect the flag to that section. Let’s engage the services of an engineering student at the University of Washington to figure that out. She could do it for extra credit.

Second, how do we decide what events are worth celebrating? I’ve asked several people that question, and the most common response involved the death of a specific, and most peculiar, U.S.-born person.

That wouldn’t work. We need at least 75% of the U.S. population to support any flag-raising to the position of super-staff. This country doesn’t need anything new to yell about.

For whatever reason, humans seem better at identifying reasons to be sad than glad, so it’s tough to recall events that might merit countrywide commemoration with a super-staff flag. I was able to think of only a handful that have happened in my lifetime:

■ July 20, 1969: Astronauts land on the moon.

■ April 17, 1970: The Apollo 13 crew returns alive to earth.

■ Feb. 22, 1980: The U.S. hockey team beats the Soviet Union for the Olympic gold medal.

■ Sept. 16, 1987: The Montreal Protocol is ratified by 197 nations, banning the production and distribution of ozone-depleting chemicals.

■ Dec. 14, 2020: The first COVID vaccinations start flowing into the arms of health care workers.

Let’s figure out other events worthy of joy, then we can start petitioning our government for a redress of joys.