With the recent talk about changing our state flag, I’m a bit puzzled as to why time and resources should be expended in such a direction. Rather than changing our flag, we might do well to contemplate its imagery in a new light.
Particularly lost to our understanding today is the imagery of the beehive. Rather than being a hub for mindless drones, it denotes a society in which each individual works together for the good of the whole.
Leonard Arrington, a historian from years past, challenged the hoary myth that “the Mountain West was a land of rugged individualism developed by rugged individualists and rugged corporations.” Much of this state’s economic development was accomplished by “group saving and group investment under planned direction.”
However one may feel about our theocratic roots as far as Euro-American settlement is concerned, it was nevertheless a universe away from the ultraconservatism garbed in Christianity that has held sway around here for the last hundred years. Some might even have an easier time in drawing a redesigned flag from memory, but I suspect that such a flag’s symbolic meaning and power will only sink as deep as the paper.
Wesley Long, Murray
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