Flag Day

In case you missed it, yesterday was June 14th. I caught some of it, but part of the day I was driving with Rebecka from northern Ohio, with another significant portion of the day spent recovering from said driving. Then, we went on to church in the evening and spent time with some friends afterward at a Mexican restaurant (though most of the time at the restaurant was not spent eating as there were about veinte of us).

My point for today, however, is not to inform you of the minutiae of a random Sunday. No, today I come to you with another purpose: to inform you of the minutiae of a random day of the year, namely June 14th.

Most notably you may have noted the many news media notations of that notable American holiday of the year that involves the date June 14th: Flag Day. Now, with my Lincoln County Public Educational System (motto: "Where the students of today are prepared for tomorrow's snow day.") history education, I don't really know that much about Flag Day. I attribute part of this omission from the class objectives to the fact that Flag Day occurs during summer break and, therefore, did not allow for us to have a free day to spend every class making some kind of papier-mâché (French for "student-made art project filled with glue and paper") flag. Another reason I think Flag Day was not taught was because it is not an official federal holiday and, thus, no retail store sales advertisements.

Ultimately, I believe the main reason I never learned anything about Flag Day has to do with the fact that I was not what you would call a "sports enthusiast" or an "athlete" nor even an "athletic supporter." This in itself had never really presented any difficulty to me except for the fact that my history teachers were very sports enthusiastic. In fact, I am fairly certain it is a state requirement that all high school sports coaches have a history degree. To fill their time in between practices and ball games, the coaches have a secondary job to sit at their desks in a high school history class and recount old stories about games they should have won and how great the football team was this weekend, but that they need to step it up for the next game. These stories, I believe, counted in the content standards for history education.

Apart from all this, Flag Day is an important day to commemorate as I'm sure it has something to do with the American flag and patriotism and the fact that there are only about twenty more shopping days until July 4th, as indicated by the many flags that appear magically overnight on the many telephone and electric poles down every Main Street in the USA, probably put there by history teachers in an effort to recruit more athletes for the next school year.