Hawai'i's true colors on display

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Columnist

All over Hawai'i this week, people are showing their red, white and blue spirit.

American flags are flapping proudly from stores, homes, mailboxes and cars. They're plastered on pillars and telephone poles. There are little flag lapels and giant banners everywhere. You see them poking out of upstairs windows and in the recesses of underground garages.

People are parading their old red, white and blue fashion statements, too.

At a Starbucks on Tuesday, a woman wearing a tarnished, but somehow still festive, flag hat entered the store, ordered a double latte, and left without anyone noticing anything unusual about her. A couple of hours later, a guy wearing American flag gym shorts rode by Honolulu Hale on a bicycle, carrying a full-sized red, white and blue banner without drawing any second looks.

Everyone, it seems, is trying to send us a message, even if it's not always the same message.

"People are profoundly committed to the country in a lot of different ways," said Jen Cordell, a Honolulu police dispatcher who was pondering the sudden appearance of all that red, white and blue from a window seat at the Morning Brew coffee shop in Kailua. "The flag can mean whatever they want it to mean for them."

In a land of diversity, the flag stands for unity. In a land of unity, the flag stands for diversity.

For some, the flag is a symbol of military strength. For them, it means America stands ready to strike back hard at whoever dared to do this to us. "You can't stomp on us and not expect to get your butt kicked," said one store manager, who was flying a flag from a bicycle tethered to a parking meter outside his Ware Avenue shop.

For others, the flag represents another kind of strength. That's the power we draw from our faith in Democratic ideals, the ones that can't ever be snuffed out by an act of terror, no matter how dastardly.

Some people find moral strength in the flag, too. For them, flying the flag is a symbol of our courage and resoluteness in the face of an unknown enemy.

Still others, I suspect, are showing their American colors this week out of respect for those who lost their lives and all the rest who are hurting. They don't see themselves as military patriots, great civil libertarians, or moral stalwarts. They probably never even thought of themselves as flag wavers before. They are simply American folk who are hurting along with the rest of the country.

In the end it doesn't matter why people are really showing the flag; what matters is that we're all showing our true colors right now.

Or as Oliver Wendell Homes put it: "One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, one nation, evermore!"

Mike Leidemann's columns appear Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach him at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5460.