Flames of Freedom
One man's quest to transform flag burning into a symbol of patriotism
STORY BY STEVE HAHN PHOTO BY NATALIE LOVELESS
The orange flames lick the evening sky as Brent Adams and Sha Lar hold separate ends of a large United States flag. Adams surveys the dozen or so onlookers gathered at Seabright Beach during the evening of July 3. Finally, he begins the ceremony. “I want to dedicate this to all the men and women who have died in foreign wars fighting to protect our freedoms,” he says.
Then, Adams and Lar gently place the flag atop the bonfire. The flames consume the object within a matter of seconds. After a tense and deathly silent pause, the onlookers grab their own flags and begin to burn them as everyone joins in singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
This surreal scene has been replayed at Seabright Beach for the past four years, always during the Fourth of July weekend. Brent Adams, the middle-age man who thought up the event, considers it one of the most patriotic ceremonies of the weekend.
“It’s exactly the opposite energy one would expect,’ he says. “There’s a knee-jerk reaction to say that it’s un-American to burn the flag, but it’s really profoundly American. The flag represents our freedoms, one of which is the right to burn it. So in a way the burning flag is a higher symbol of our freedoms than the flag itself.”
Adams started the event in reaction to ongoing efforts by Congress to create a constitutional amendment that would ban flag burning in any form. Efforts to outlaw the act date back to the anti-Vietnam war protests of 1968, but the amendment has been heard in Congress every other year during the last decade.
When Adams caught wind of these efforts, he was shocked. For him, the burning flag represents the true spirit of the United States – the freedom to disagree with government policies and engage in heated debate in the public arena. That led him to think up this counter-intuitive ceremony, in which a symbol of protest would be transformed into a celebration of the American ideal. This time around, the flag would be burned not to protest government policy, but to celebrate a founding principle of the nation.
“I had never burned a flag and I didn’t think I would ever want to,” says Adams. “But as soon as that right was threatened, I realized how important the act is for the country. A [burning flag] symbolizes for me how great the country is – that you can protest your government. This is a consecration of the flag – we want to make it a sacred, celebratory symbol. It’s not a desecration.”
Nuz agrees it was a solemn, thoughtful ceremony, but it left us with one question: Where are the marshmallows?
