Upside Down Flags Across America

You know what I didn’t see a lot of at the marches on Saturday?

Millions marching. Tons of signs. Great messaging. Very few flags.

It made me sad.

The American flag, which I grew up saluting in the mornings, saying the pledge of allegiance, was once the ultimate symbol of unity and freedom. It was carried into battlefields over the past centuries, raised in defiance on the ashes of the Twin Towers.

But it was nearly invisible among the thousands marching for the most American things of all. Reproductive rights, democracy, justice, truth. It wasn’t lost. It was left behind.

I saw one. On a jacket. Upside down.

Do you know what an upside down flag means? It’s a distress signal. The only time you’re supposed to raise the American flag upside down is in times of extreme danger. It’s meant to be seen from afar—on a battlefield, from a watchtower, high atop a fort—to let others know: we are not okay. Help is needed.

If ever there were a time.

We’ve entered a moment in this country when the flag no longer feels like it belongs to all of us. And I realize now too, that for some, it never did. We didn’t see the flag at civil rights marches in the '60s either. For many, it has symbolized oppression—not freedom. A flag planted in the soil of slavery and conquest, one that flew over internment camps where Japanese Americans were wrongly detained, and Jim Crow laws. That’s a big one. That is the one that history doesn’t just vanish with a pledge or a fireworks display.

Now it’s everywhere. We see it flown high and hard by those banning books and storming the Capitol. It flaps on the back of pickup trucks like a warning. A threat. It’s no longer about patriotism—it’s intimidation. Huge flags. Loud flags. MAGA flags that warp and twist the stars and stripes into something tribal, something fearful.

But the truth is: the flag belongs to all of us. And it’s time we reclaim it—not in blind loyalty to a broken system, but in love for what this country could still be.

Let’s fly it again. Let’s put it on our cars. Let’s carry it into the streets—upside down.

Not in surrender, but in signal. We are in crisis. We are in distress. And we cannot wait to turn it right side up again—to watch it rise the way it was always meant to, as a banner of possibility.

I keep thinking about Robert Redford in The Last Castle. A prisoner. A general. A man of quiet dignity who leads a revolt not with violence, but with honor. Spoiler alert, he’s shot in the back just as he raises the American flag—not as a symbol of the prison he’s in, but as a final act of defiance and belief. As it catches the wind, it says everything. We’re still here. We still believe in what this could be.

Maybe that’s what we need now. Not silence. Not surrender. But a signal to those of us who want a different America. A clear, visible, impossible to ignore, upside down flag. On the back of our cars. On our porches. And, we can look forward to the day, we can turn them right side up. Oh happy day.

So I’m buying a flag. I’m flying it upside down. Not because I’ve given up. But because I won’t.