This is an exploration of the use of the Flag of One People to accomplish the act of reparations. This requires defining the purpose of reparations and the meaning of national symbols.

Generally, reparations are seen as payment by one group to another group of people to compensate for a past injustice. Usually the injustice occurred recently and those making the reparation payment have some direct connection with the injustice.

In the case of slavery, the connections between those causing the injustice and those paying the reparations are tenuous. No one currently alive has any direct or personal connection with slavery. Moreover, those who would receive the reparations payments also have no direct or personal connection with slavery.

Many of those viewed as "white" were not even connected with this country during the time of slavery. And the same goes for many viewed as "black." Even the issue of identity is blurred with a fairly large group of people who are both white and black. Some "blacks" come from Nigeria and Ghana. Some "whites" just arrived from Bosnia, China or Pakistan. The effort required to determine who should pay and who should be paid would be significant and divisive.

There are several other barriers to success with cash reparations. The most important is that blacks do not represent the only brutalized community. That belongs to the Native Americans who suffered five hundred years of genocidal onslaught. Nor does it account for the fates of those Europeans who were sent to America in chains as criminals and indentured servants. Nor does it account for the Chinese sent as indentured workers captive to their masters in China. Nor the Mexicans dispossessed of their lands in Texas and California. This list can go on. All of these past atrocities and injustices simply increase the number of people with grievances worthy of recognition and perhaps reparations.

We cannot undo that which has already been done. We cannot undo Wounded Knee or Little Big Horn. We cannot undo the Trail of Tears or the California bounty on Indian heads. We cannot undo the lynchings, the families destroyed through slavery, the poverty of the culture of Appalachia or the poverty of the current culture of the inner city.

All of these injustices, all of these atrocities, are part of the fabric of this nation and this culture. We sometimes attempt to hide from them, to deny that they are part of who we are. That many felt the lash and many wielded the whip. And for some, a shared heritage holds both the hand that raised the whip and the back that felt the lash.

There is a further challenge. How can someone who is poor and impoverished make reparations to someone who is wealthy and powerful? How can a recent immigrant from Sri Lanka or an Appalachian farmer grant reparations to a wealthy and powerful person who happens to be black or partly black? Can someone who is partly black and partly white make reparations to themselves? Is a Nigerian-American the same as an African-American and therefore eligible for cash reparations?

Cash compensation will not accomplish our goals. The issues are too complex and the administration would be too burdensome. The primary effect of cash compensation would most likely be to build in yet another cycle of resentment and injustice.

If the purpose of reparations is to recognize and acknowledge injustice then perhaps there are other means of recognizing the validity of the claim for reparations besides just taking money from one group and giving it to another.

How we look at money is part of the act of reparations. Money is what we use when we cannot use love and friendship. Our most valued relationships and our most treasured acts are not financial. They are the child raised, the meal cooked, the garden tended, the clothes sewn. The direct exchange of love and trust within a family and a small community of friends. We use money when the complexity of what we want moves beyond our community of love and friendship. Money is the necessary substitute for love and friendship in our larger community. Money is also what is often substituted for love and trust when love and trust fail. As in divorce.

When we all lived in small family communities, in tribes and clans, money was not necessary. All of the transactions of daily life were handled by trust and friendship. I farm, you hunt. I sew, you cook. I milk, you fish. The community was shared and succeeded on the trust and respect all members had for each other. The trust and friendship that today may be part of our very close community of family and friends was once the dominant relationship that we had with almost all those we knew.

True reparations would not come from shifting some money around, but from establishing a community of trust and friendship, a community of clearly acknowledged mutual respect. It would be difficult to imagine that, given a choice between a community of trust and friendship and cash, people would choose cash. And, if they would choose cash, it may be that those who would choose cash do not know or cannot believe in a community of trust and friendship.

Building a community of trust and friendship therefore requires a very powerful symbol that can overcome a history of injustice, cruelty, betrayal, loss and grief. This symbol must reach deep into our souls and must represent a clear choice of ownership and affirmation. It must be powerful and visible.

The Flag of One People may be able to accomplish this. Its colors and pattern both bind our futures and explicitly recognize and acknowledge our past. Our past to celebrate and affirm and our past to grieve.

The red is the blood we have shed, not just the shared battles, such as Normandy and Valley Forge, but also the agonizingly painful, such as Wounded Knee, Antietam, Rosewood, Greenwood and the Tulsa riot. We are as bound by the blood we have shed of each other as we are by the blood we have shed for each other.

The green is this land that supports and holds all of us. We are contained and defined by the boundaries of our land.

The stars remain the states, the blue the seas that bound us and the sky that holds us. The thirteen stripes are the original colonies and the colors of the stripes represent all of us who have come together, for whatever reason, to make this land our land.

The Flag of One People should at the very least be a source of significant debate. It is not the flag of European America, nor is it the flag of black nationalism. Nor does it narrowly focus on just a few out of the many who have created us. It includes everybody, every Hispanic, every Asian, every Native American, every African, every European and every mix of all of us. The Flag of One People says, "This is my land, this is your land, this is our land. Let us celebrate together all that we have accomplished and grieve together all that we have suffered."

The Flag of One People would become our new Old Glory. An explicit acknowledgement by all Americans to all Americans that we are one people bound together by our history of courage and growth. As our national symbol The Flag of One People proclaims that all are included, all are recognized, all are striving for reconciliation and all can celebrate together the nation that we have created and are continuing to create.

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