It’s been nearly twenty-five years since I wrote the story of my struggles to locate an American flag on sale, anywhere, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Those days when everyone seemed to walk around staring at something a thousand yards away, as if we were all trying to make sense of something that we couldn’t wrap our minds around.
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If you are old enough, you know exactly what I am talking about: the sense that even the world had somehow lowered its volume in respect.
There were no flags to be had anywhere.
Sold out.
Then an old friend handed me Jimmy’s Flag.
Graphic: Author via AI
It was into that world, into those muted dawns of September 2001, that I hoisted my old friend’s flag, raising a fist to the world, swearing that WE WOULD NEVER FORGET!
Jimmy’s Flag flew proudly against an American sky for years.
We relocated, not once, but twice since, and the flag sat forgotten in a dusty moving box labeled “OFFICE,” tucked away in a corner of the garage among all the things we keep simply because we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw them away.
Graphic: Author via AI
I found the box last week, buried under a decade of things we swore we’d use again, and dug out the case. I removed the back from the flag display case. The stars looked a bit frayed, the thread showing signs of age, the edges more tattered than I recalled. There was dust on the colors, thick along the canton where the stars sit, and I ran my hands over it, wiping it away in slow strokes, half expecting the years to have dulled what was underneath.
But the colors!
Brilliant blue and red and virginal white had never lost their shine.
I sat and stared at the folded memory in my hands.
What’s happened to us?
Everybody had banners on their cars in those days. The Stars and Stripes flew from millions of homes across every State. Congress stood as one, united on the steps of the People’s House, and sang God Bless America!
What the Hell happened to us?
We said they’d hear from us, and hear from us.
They did.
And we said: “NEVER FORGET.”
We forgot.
Twenty-five years after warning that the enemy was at the gates, we’ve thrown them wide open.
We are electing devout Muslims to Congress. We are electing Communists, and don’t bother wasting your time trying to explain how they are not Communists, because denying they’re Communists until they’re NOT denying being Communists is the one thing all Communists have in common.
We forgot.
Today, DSA members (read: Communists) hold dozens of federal and state legislative seats, and over 250 elected offices overall, compared with about 50 Muslim Americans serving in Congress and state legislatures. The comparison is striking: a political coalition representing a markedly anti-American platform has achieved a level of representation in American government comparable to that of an entire religious community.
In this post-September 11 world, America is electing what 25, 30, 40 years ago, were known to be sworn enemies of the nation.
You want names? I’ll give you their own words. I didn’t have to make a single one up.
Ilhan Omar stood at Columbia last year and asked whether Jewish students were “pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” She once told the country American support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins, baby.” The House stripped her of her Foreign Affairs Committee seat. Her constituents sent her right back anyway.
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Rashida Tlaib told a podcast that thinking about the Holocaust gave her a “calming feeling.” She retweeted a blood libel about a Palestinian child, dressed it up as fact, and only grudgingly walked it back after it turned out to be a drowning. She has called for abolishing ICE, the police, and the federal prison system, three of the four load-bearing walls of a functioning country.
Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor of New York City, sworn in on New Year’s Day. His first executive order revoked the city’s adoption of the definition of antisemitism our own State Department uses; his second lifted restrictions on boycotting Israel. Israel’s foreign ministry called it “antisemitic gasoline on an open fire”. He has since gone on national television and called for abolishing ICE outright, as mayor of the largest Jewish city on Earth outside Tel Aviv.
Abdul El-Sayed is running for Michigan’s Senate seat. He has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza “bloodthirsty,” demanded an end to American military aid, and called ICE “irredeemable.” He campaigned with Hasan Piker, a Twitch star who once said “America deserved 9/11,” called Hamas “a thousand times better” than the nation it attacked, and told a livestream that October 7’s rapes “doesn’t change the dynamic” for him. Asked to disavow him, El-Sayed wouldn’t.
Five names. Two in Congress, one at City Hall, one chasing a Senate seat, and one megaphone bigger than half of cable news.
And the Anti-Defamation League counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents last year. Two Israeli embassy staffers gunned down in Washington. The most physical assaults on Jews ever recorded in a year. “Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor,” the ADL’s director said. That is not the country that stood united on the Capitol steps in September of 2001 and sang God Bless America without irony.
I keep wanting to say somebody did this to us. But nobody did this to us.
We did this.
We put the flag in a box marked “OFFICE,” and we went back to arguing about nothing that mattered, while the people who never stopped organizing walked right through the gate we forgot to guard.
Here’s the thing about Jimmy’s Flag, though. It’s still blue. Still red. Still that same stubborn, defiant white. Cloth doesn’t forget. Only people do.
The same country electing these five clowns produced three hundred and forty-three firefighters who ran up those stairs while everyone else ran down and didn’t have to be asked twice. Jimmy never got to hand me this flag himself. It was his widow, Lidia, who put it in my hands, because that’s what you do with the thing left standing after everything else falls down: you pass it to the next person and tell them to keep it flying.
So Jimmy’s Flag is out of the box.
Not the metaphor, the actual flag. I’m going to hang it out front where the whole street can see it, the same way I did in 2001, because a flag raised in defiance means twice what one raised in comfort ever will.
We said never forget, and then we forgot.
Fine.
We’re allowed to remember late.
The gate’s open, and the enemy’s coming through it, but Jimmy’s Flag is flying again, and when I fall, someone will raise it again, and this fight won’t ever be over.
It’s just getting started.
Never forget.
And this time…
WE. BETTER. MEAN IT.
Luis Gonzalez is the owner and publisher of The Last Wire, an independent blog covering news, politics, opinion, and the rabbit holes beneath the headlines. His work has also appeared in The American Thinker. He has been writing online since 2000 and is the founder of Boiling Frogs, a personal blog launched in 2008. He hangs his hat at The Briefing Room, where he excels at the role of resident curmudgeon.