Stolen Symbols

Justice Alito is in trouble lately because his wife flew an upside-down American flag. Now, the upside-down flag has ... or had ... a specific meaning. It was a symbol of distress or danger per the Flag Code. Some from the "Stop the Steal" movement opted to fly the flag that way on January 6, which obviously meant, "The election was fraudently stolen" and not an indication of distress or danger. Or ... was it? We'll never know. Now Dems want to silence Supreme Court Justice Alito because his wife put one up because she felt distressed and in danger. And that will never do. So the Legislative Branch is seeking to silence "opposing voices" in the Judicial Branch. And we can no longer fly an upside-down American flag as a distress symbol because some movement stole it. Same thing with the Appeal to Heaven flag. A Revolutionary War flag, now it's been stolen by some far right group and anyone who has one had better be arrested or go into hiding.

Symbols are powerful tools ... or weapons. The swastika that we all connect with fascist Nazi Germany came from Hinduism as a symbol of prosperity and good luck. The rainbow was a symbol of peace and was coopted to symbolize LGBT stuff. So many symbols have been stolen, twisted, and fed back with a new meaning. Of course, the most common symbols stolen and twisted are words. Words are symbols of thoughts and ideas. Like when we used to refer to "marriage" as a lifelong union of a man and a woman for purposes of procreation and mutual support (that's a lot of meaning in a single symbol). Today it means, "I like you a lot ... for now." Biblically, "love" means self-sacrifice for the best interest of the other, but we've twisted it to "I feel warmly toward you ... want to have sex?" Not even close. There's one, too -- "sex." The act was intended by God to symbolize the union of two people (marriage) as an image of Christ's relationship to His Bride, the Church (Eph 5:31-32). Now it's mostly just a recreational pasttime. "Christian" once referred to "followers of Christ". It shifted to mean "the body of people who use the term" until today it simply means "whoever claims it." And as Christ Himself said, too often those who claim the word "Christian" often have nothing to do with it (Matt 7:21-23).

As illustrated in the Alito story, appropriated symbols make a mess of things. I see an upside-down American flag and think "distress" and others think "crazy conspiracy theorists." I hear the word, "love," and want to think it's about self-sacrifice and the greater good of others, but it's not anymore. We don't have a word for that anymore. It's like George Orwell's "newspeak" from the novel, 1984. The government was controlling minds by controlling speech so that they could no longer think the concepts that the changed words intended. Our world government, the god of this world, is doing that today. Symbols are coopted. Ideas are erased. Concepts can barely be expressed anymore. And we still think we're communicating just fine because, "Hey, we both used the same word!" Same word? Maybe, but not the same idea.