Within the predawn hours of July 4, a small, blue home simply outdoors Binghamton, New York, caught hearth. James Sitek, chief of the West Colesville Fireplace Firm, was one of many firefighters who responded to the blaze. Shortly after rising from the constructing, he went into cardiac arrest. He was pronounced useless on the hospital later that day.
The next week, greater than 200 folks attended Sitek’s funeral. New York Governor Kathy Hochul had ordered American flags on authorities buildings throughout the state to be lowered to half-staff in his honor. In Binghamton, the lowered flag was a potent signal of a neighborhood in mourning. Elsewhere within the state, although—100 miles to the west or the north or the east—it could seemingly have elicited solely a shrug.
Decreasing the flag was as soon as a comparatively uncommon image of public mourning and respect. However Sitek’s flag reducing was the twenty first within the state in the course of the first seven months of this yr—starting with a month-long commemoration of President Jimmy Carter that began simply earlier than the brand new yr and persevering with with respects paid to, amongst others, 4 former members of Congress, two New York State Law enforcement officials, and a highway-maintenance supervisor for the state Division of Transportation.
Up to now 15 years, flags in New York have been lowered greater than 250 instances for a complete of greater than 850 days of public mourning. That equates to roughly at some point per week.
New York shouldn’t be distinctive. States throughout the nation now decrease the flag for all method of tragedies, in addition to an array of annual federal observances, a few of which—Peace Officers Memorial Day, for example—many individuals don’t understand exist.
A ritual’s energy doesn’t lie in “the ritual itself, however within the which means that individuals connect to it,” Nancy Berns, a sociologist at Drake College who research grief, informed me. Removed from uniting us in widespread feeling, the sight of a lowered flag as we speak is extra more likely to set off a generalized sense of disquiet: One thing unhealthy has occurred, identical to it all the time does. Flag reducing has grow to be a largely empty gesture, illegible to the broader public and finally ignored.
The primary well known report of a flag being lowered to mark a demise got here in 1612, when a Greenlandic Inuit killed the British explorer James Corridor with a spear, apparently in retaliation for his countrymen’s kidnapping of a number of Inuit on an earlier expedition. Corridor’s ship, the Coronary heart’s Ease, sailed again to London with the flag “hanging down, in token and signal of the demise of Mr. Corridorour normal,” a member of the crew wrote.
The observance was used sparingly in early American historical past to mark vital deaths—George Washington’s, in 1799, Andrew Jackson’s, in 1845—or to specific public approbation. Flags have been dropped at half-staff in 1765 to protest the Stamp Act, which imposed a British battle tax on the colonists. Eighty-nine years later, Chicago shipowners lowered their flags when their senator opposed spending on key river and harbor tasks.
Such commemorations have been, for essentially the most half, spontaneous and domestically initiated as a part of broader demonstrations of public sorrow. “Minute weapons are firing, and flags are lowered to half-mast on all public buildings and on the transport,” a New Orleans journalist noticed in 1852 after the demise of the “Nice Compromiser,” Senator Henry Clay. “Enterprise is suspended, and the entire metropolis, with out distinction of social gathering, be a part of within the normal grief.”
Any excessive marks of common sorrow have been quickly overshadowed by the devastation of the Civil Conflict. In each the North and the South, loss was omnipresent, and flags have been lowered to honor the useless throughout most of the remembrances that came about within the years after the battle.
It was not till 1954 that some uniformity was launched to the follow. President Dwight Eisenhower, involved about haphazard shows, established parameters that stay in impact as we speak: 30 days at half-staff following the demise of a president; 10 days for a vp, Supreme Court docket chief justice, or speaker of the Home of Representatives; and so forth. He additionally gave the president discretion to bestow the consideration extra typically.
President Invoice Clinton was the primary to speed up the pattern nationally, based on Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist on the College of Houston who has studied presidential proclamations. Clinton signed Nationwide Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day into legislation, directed that the flag ought to be lowered every year on Peace Officers Memorial Day, and was typically extra liberal in his use of the gesture than his predecessors.
Succeeding presidents have surpassed Clinton in frequency of flag reducing, and in some instances put their very own imprint on the follow. President Barack Obama usually known as upon the image to acknowledge these killed in mass shootings. “There was a way that polarization was rising and one choice to decrease the temperature was to convey the nation collectively by way of these moments of reflection,” Rottinghaus informed me.
President Donald Trump, who has ordered the flag to half-staff seven instances throughout his second time period, has additionally honored victims of mass shootings, together with these killed at a faculty in Minneapolis in August. His use of the gesture in different instances has been extra partisan, marking the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, for instance, however not that of Melissa Hortman, a Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota.
Governors, although, have contributed essentially the most to the pattern through the years. In lots of states, the legal guidelines surrounding flag reducing are imprecise. In New York, the governor might honor any “public servant who, within the opinion of the native company involved, contributed to the neighborhood.” Such proclamations might be helpful as a political gesture, one which prices a governor nothing to challenge.
The result’s that EMTs, cops, and highway-crew staff who die on the job now generally obtain the identical honor as soon as historically bestowed solely on the nation’s nice statesmen and navy heroes.
The order to decrease the flag comes regularly, however is utilized inconsistently. On the day of Sitek’s statewide honor, I drove previous 20 public flagpoles—outdoors city halls, libraries, firehouses, colleges, and parks—close to my home in Rochester, about 150 miles from Binghamton. Solely two of them had lowered their flag.
I met a person named Rasheed Hayood strolling by certainly one of them. He didn’t know why the flag was at half-staff. However after I informed him about Sitek, he stated he supported the gesture. “He was doing good out right here,” he stated. “These are the folks we have now to like.” Hayood turned out to be a safety guard at a retirement residence who usually took it upon himself to decrease the flag outdoors when he heard {that a} member of the navy had died.
The human impulse to grieve collectively is irrepressible. We sit shiva. We paint murals and print T-shirts. We gown in particular garments and drive in gradual processions to cemeteries that function bodily gathering locations for mourners and the mourned alike. We perceive that being part of a neighborhood signifies that struggling should be shared.
Flag reducing, for essentially the most half, not fulfills that function. Stacy Otto, a professor on the Illinois State Faculty of Schooling who has written about public shows of grief, recommended that it will probably even be a approach to evade the load of that shared grief.
“Individuals are uncomfortable with different folks dying,” she informed me. “Once we decrease flags to half-staff, we will say we’re doing one thing and honoring folks, nevertheless it’s sort of a grief lite. It’s grief with the ache eliminated.”
Decreasing the frequency of flag reducing may imbue the gesture with which means as soon as extra. We may additionally embrace other forms of public mourning: moments of silence at occasions; impromptu roadside shrines manufactured from candles, pictures, or different private mementos; and extra lasting gestures corresponding to renaming buildings and planting timber. “Completely different technique of mourning are going to succeed in totally different folks,” Berns, the sociologist, stated.
Sitek’s spouse, Suzanne, informed me that the lowered flags honoring her husband meant rather a lot to her as a proud American. Their son, Matthew, who can also be a volunteer firefighter, stated that it “was a really good and courteous skilled gesture” however one which his grief left him little vitality to understand. Extra vital, he stated, was the best way neighborhood members rallied across the household in much less public methods. When, within the days after his dad’s demise, the pump on his mom’s nicely acquired knocked out in a storm, a squadron of firefighters confirmed as much as assist restore it.
The procession taking James Sitek to his closing resting place lined 10 miles, and flags have been lowered alongside the best way. However different honors spoke extra clearly to his life: The white gloves and gown caps on the scores of first responders who attended the funeral. The gleam of rigorously polished hearth vehicles within the July solar. The keening of bagpipes. And, as Sitek’s physique was carried from the church, the tolling of the fireplace bell, indicating the top of his decades-long service.
