New flags for Wallace

It was my family’s great honor to buy all the 65 American flags for the entire Wallace downtown and some residential areas. I have also bought five of American’s earliest flags known both as Pine Tree Flag and Washington’s Flag — for my Cypress Street Garden District neighborhood the text on that flag reads, “An Appeal to Heaven’’.

I contend, the words on these flags are what we need to harken to during these hard darker days. We bought all the City’s flags not because I am a man of great means - I am just a simple carpenter - who simply found a need and filled it because all the ones that were previously hanging were dingy, faded, torn and 17 where missing.

Being downtrodden is not how we need to think of Wallace nor our nation. Yes, these are hard times and many are afeared for their lives, survival of their business and the general overall craziness that seems to daily appear from out of everywhere. But, this too, will change. For the sun always comes out shining on all of God’s children “those just and unjust alike” and greater onto those who have come to their senses and started loving their neighbors and community. After all, patriotism is not just waving the flag or rattling instruments of war but, it is a lifelong dedication to one’s country.

It is not only the military we ought to thank for service but also to those people picking up trash, in the rain, along our byways because that flag stands for all our “better natures” no matter what your politics are or journey through life is.

Take a moment of honor, find a need, then fill it, so we all arise from this moment in time together because that is the way Americans have always acted— “Out of Many, One” E Pluribus Unum.

Jon Ruggles,

Wallace