Within the predawn hours of July 4, a small, blue home simply exterior Binghamton, New York, caught hearth. James Sitek, chief of the West Colesville Hearth 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 group in mourning. Elsewhere within the state, although—100 miles to the west or the north or the east—it will possible 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 decreasing was the twenty first within the state through the first seven months of this 12 months—starting with a month-long commemoration of President Jimmy Carter that began simply earlier than the brand new 12 months 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.
Prior to now 15 years, flags in New York have been lowered greater than 250 occasions for a complete of greater than 850 days of public mourning. That equates to roughly sooner or later every week.
New York will not 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 notice exist.
A ritual’s energy doesn’t lie in “the ritual itself, however within the which means that folks connect to it,” Nancy Berns, a sociologist at Drake College who research grief, advised me. Removed from uniting us in frequent feeling, the sight of a lowered flag right this moment is extra more likely to set off a generalized sense of disquiet: One thing dangerous has occurred, similar to it at all times does. Flag decreasing has develop into a largely empty gesture, illegible to the broader public and finally ignored.
The primary widely 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 important deaths—George Washington’s, in 1799, Andrew Jackson’s, in 1845—or to precise public approbation. Flags have been delivered to half-staff in 1765 to protest the Stamp Act, which imposed a British struggle tax on the colonists. Eighty-nine years later, Chicago shipowners lowered their flags when their senator opposed spending on key river and harbor initiatives.
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 get together, be part of within the normal grief.”
Any excessive marks of common sorrow have been quickly overshadowed by the devastation of the Civil Struggle. In each the North and the South, loss was omnipresent, and flags have been lowered to honor the useless throughout lots of the remembrances that came about within the years after the struggle.
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 right this moment: 30 days at half-staff following the demise of a president; 10 days for a vice chairman, Supreme Court docket chief justice, or speaker of the Home of Representatives; and so forth. He additionally gave the president discretion to bestow the respect extra usually.
President Invoice Clinton was the primary to speed up the pattern nationally, in accordance with 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 needs to be lowered annually on Peace Officers Memorial Day, and was usually extra liberal in his use of the gesture than his predecessors.
Succeeding presidents have surpassed Clinton in frequency of flag decreasing, and in some circumstances put their very own imprint on the follow. President Barack Obama typically referred to 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 carry the nation collectively by way of these moments of reflection,” Rottinghaus advised me.
President Donald Trump, who has ordered the flag to half-staff seven occasions throughout his second time period, has additionally honored victims of mass shootings, together with these killed at a college in Minneapolis in August. His use of the gesture in different circumstances 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 over time. In lots of states, the legal guidelines surrounding flag decreasing are obscure. In New York, the governor could honor any “public servant who, within the opinion of the native company involved, contributed to the group.” Such proclamations may be helpful as a political gesture, one which prices a governor nothing to situation.
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 army 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—exterior city halls, libraries, firehouses, faculties, 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 one in every of them. He didn’t know why the flag was at half-staff. However after I advised him about Sitek, he mentioned he supported the gesture. “He was doing good out right here,” he mentioned. “These are the folks we’ve to like.” Hayood turned out to be a safety guard at a retirement house who typically took it upon himself to decrease the flag exterior when he heard {that a} member of the army had died.
The human impulse to grieve collectively is irrepressible. We sit shiva. We paint murals and print T-shirts. We costume in particular garments and drive in sluggish processions to cemeteries that function bodily gathering locations for mourners and the mourned alike. We perceive that being part of a group implies that struggling have to be shared.
Flag decreasing, for essentially the most half, not fulfills that goal. Stacy Otto, a professor on the Illinois State School of Schooling who has written about public shows of grief, recommended that it will possibly even be a approach to evade the load of that shared grief.
“Persons are uncomfortable with different folks dying,” she advised me. “After we decrease flags to half-staff, we will say we’re doing one thing and honoring folks, however it’s type of a grief lite. It’s grief with the ache eliminated.”
Decreasing the frequency of flag decreasing might imbue the gesture with which means as soon as extra. We might additionally embrace different kinds of public mourning: moments of silence at occasions; impromptu roadside shrines fabricated from candles, images, or different private mementos; and extra lasting gestures reminiscent of renaming buildings and planting bushes. “Totally different technique of mourning are going to succeed in completely different folks,” Berns, the sociologist, mentioned.
Sitek’s spouse, Suzanne, advised me that the lowered flags honoring her husband meant so much to her as a proud American. Their son, Matthew, who can be a volunteer firefighter, mentioned that it “was a really good and courteous skilled gesture” however one which his grief left him little power to understand. Extra important, he mentioned, was the best way group 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 obtained knocked out in a storm, a squadron of firefighters confirmed as much as assist restore it.
The procession taking James Sitek to his remaining resting place coated 10 miles, and flags have been lowered alongside the best way. However different honors spoke extra clearly to his life: The white gloves and costume caps on the scores of first responders who attended the funeral. The gleam of rigorously polished hearth vans within the July solar. The keening of bagpipes. And, as Sitek’s physique was carried from the church, the tolling of the hearth bell, indicating the top of his decades-long service.
