Half mast

When to fly the flag at half-mast

On five official days you should know about you should fly the flag at half-mast.

You should fly the flag at half-mast on Peace Officers Memorial Day which is May fifteenth.
Peace Officers are policemen, and they are memorialized as a group, without consideration
of whether they have been the man with the chokehold or the plunger handle or
or whether they have been the man who directs the traffic and saves the walkers and the drivers
or the man who talks the jumper down from the ledge sweating and shaking.

You should fly the flag at half-mast on Memorial Day which is the last Monday in May.
Those who you memorialize on this day are the soldiers who died in battle.
You memorialize them in a group, because it is holy to die in battle.
You raise the flag to the top at noon. This is because we don't mourn the war dead,
we celebrate them. But just the soldiers. Not the others.

You should fly the flag at half-mast on Korean War Veterans Day which is July twenty-seventh.
This war has its own veterans day.
This is the war in which the people of Korea
were divided into the North part where there is no rain and there is no soil
and the South part where there there are harbors.

You should fly the flag at half-mast on Patriot Day which is September eleventh.
This is the day when they close the schools in Boston and they have a parade
to commemmorate the four protesting people who were killed by the King's Army in 1770.
There is no day to fly the flag at half-mast for the four protesting people
who were killed by the National Guard in 1970.

You should fly the flag at half-mast on Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
This is the day that shall live in infamy because it was the first time since 1814
that the weapons of another country were used on our own things.
On this day the Japanese bombed the Pacific fleet of the United States
which was harbored at Hawaii, which was not at that time a part of the United States.

If you have a flag which cannot be lowered you are supposed to hang a black streamer from it.
If your flag is mounted on the wall you should put black bows on every corner and one in the middle.

There are other rules for flying the flag at half mast.

The President and the Governor decide for whom to fly the flag at half mast,
and for how long. Nobody else.

You should fly the flag at half-mast for thirty days after the death of a president.
Or a former president, like Ronald Reagan who died a generation's worth of years
after he said he did not remember any of the things which his cabinet talked about.
You should fly the flag at half-mast ten days when the person who died was a vice president
the chief of justice or a retired chief of justice or the speaker of the house of representatives.
You should fly the flag at half-mast until the burial
of an associate justice of the Supreme Court, secretary of a military department,
a former vice president, or the governor of a tate, territory, or possession.
You should fly the flag at half-mast the day of and the day after the death of a member of Congress.

When you fly the flag at half mast you should raise it to the top first and then lower it.
When you take down the flag for the day you should raise it to the top first and then lower it.

When a person dies who is a famous head of state,
or there is a very large tragedy that Americans notice,
or there is an aggressive action that kills a lot of Americans,
you should fly the flag at half mast if the President says so.
If it happens to other people only the President can decide
whether you should fly the flag at half-mast.

You should fly the flag at half-mast when the Pope dies.
You should fly the flag at half-mast when hundreds of thousands
die in the tsunami's waters.
You should fly the flag at half-mast when there is a bomb
on American soil, or people are deliberately killed in airplanes.
Especially when there are three thousand of them.
But if three thousand people are killed in an explosion in India
in a factory owned by Americans, you don't fly the flag at half mast
because the President didn't say so and Americans didn't notice it.

You don't fly the flag at half mast for every death.
You fly the flag at half mast for the local boy who was a football star
and was killed in the war by his own troops.
You don't fly the flag for the local boy who was killed in the war
whose mother says the war is wrong.

You fly the flag at half mast when the son of the senator dies
but not when the child of the school dies.

well, that was unusual

I don't usually write poetry.

Emma was bugged that the flag was flying at half mast for the Pope but not for Charlie.