Filed under: protest art, ritual, dissent, America 2025
I was raised with a strange reverence. In my house, the most courageous thing you could do for a tattered flag was to burn it. Not in anger. Not in defiance. But in mercy.
When a symbol has been dirtied beyond recognition—dragged through mud, torn in storms, desecrated by weather or neglect—the honorable act is release. You don’t hang it back up and pretend it’s fine. You fold it carefully, place it in fire, and let the smoke carry away what dignity remains.
It is not a celebration. It is not meant to feel good. It is the same kind of mercy you grant a suffering animal—you steel yourself, because courage demands it.
The difference, of course, is that my flag did not come pre-desecrated from years of wind and rain. It was fresh from a shelf, crisp, unblemished. And yet—what is a clean flag when the country it represents is battered daily? What is cotton and thread when the Constitution itself is ripped apart, when the people sworn to protect it desecrate it openly, repeatedly, without shame?
The cloth was intact. The ideals were not.
So I staged a funeral. I folded the flag the way I was taught. I placed it in a coffin no larger than a child’s toy box, because that is what our rituals have been reduced to—symbols nested inside symbols, grief crammed into whatever vessel will hold it. And then I gave it fire, not in rage, but in reverence.
This was no desecration. Desecration happens every time justice is mocked, every time truth is gagged, every time a leader raises their hand and swears to defend the Constitution with one breath, only to choke it with the next.
The fire was not desecration. The fire was absolution.
Let the ashes testify: mercy is not desecration.
Courageously yours,
—Rebecca M. Bell
www.rmbellwrites.com
P.S.
The flag does not scream,
but the cloth curls inward.
Ashes whisper the truths
that fire cannot hide.
Filed under: protest art, ritual, dissent, America 2025
