Christmas Is Mary's Season, Too

Image from the film The Christ Child: A Nativity Story.

December has arrived, and with it the beginning of another Advent season. 

I wasn't sure I was going to observe Advent this year, but we have an established family tradition of loading up an Advent calendar with goodies for my daughter, and I wasn't about to deprive her of the fun and anticipation of opening up a new present every morning. Then I saw the Advent wreath in the basement that my wife made for me a few years ago, along with the new Advent candles I'd bought. 

So I thought, why not? 

As I discussed in my 50,000-word blog series, while my spiritual mindset leans toward pagan thought these days, and specifically in Anglo-Saxon mythology, there's no reason I can't incorporate other traditions into my practice if I want to. One driving tenet of my Middangeardweg is that if J.RR. Tolkien, the architect of my favorite fictional universe, found inspiration and meaning in something, then there's no reason I can't as well. I see Tolkien as a tree-hugging, mythology-loving Catholic with a pagan heart, and I'm really not too far removed from that way of seeing things, which is a big part of the reason I take so much inspiration from him. I might even eventually find myself going to a Latin Mass sometime, the same Mass that Tolkien loved, to immerse myself in the peace and beauty and tradition and familiarity, even if not at all for the theology. The pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty is, after all, Platonic just as much as it is Catholic. And Plato was, of course, a pagan. Thus, when evangelicals complain that Catholicism is too pagan, the only thing I quibble with is the "too" part. The saints are like the localized and specialized demigods of old, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine ranks up there with the highest of magic, and Mary is a goddess figure to all who can see past the church's limiting dogma. She literally stood in for the goddesses that were displaced as Christianity spread into pagan strongholds.

Which brings me to my point. 

As I've said many times here, Mary is my spiritual mother. She has been ever since I was a little kid. As far away as I've ever gotten from my Catholic roots, she's always been there, the sole constant on a lifelong spiritual path that has taken me around the world and then some. To me, she is the human face of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, which Christians tend to call the Holy Spirit. She is that every bit as much as Jesus is considered the human face of the Father. They are a spiritual yin and yang. One shows us how to live an ethical life marked with love and compassion, such that we might find that the Kingdom of God is within us; and the other shows us the power of grace and humility as a tool for finding a connection to divine wisdom, much as Tolkien reminds us that the power to undo the greatest of evils sometimes comes from the smallest and humblest, from the unlikeliest and most counterintuitive of people and places. The upside-down appeal of the Christian story is that everyone expected a high and mighty king who would set the world right through force and power, and instead this king came into the world as the lowest of the low, a child born anonymously in a smelly stable to a Jewish girl of no special importance to anybody but her immediate friends and family. 

Christmas is the one time of year when even the most evangelical of Christians are forced to acknowledge Mary's existence. Even so, to many of them, she was just a flowerpot, a vessel chosen at random to do the necessary work of birthing the child who was the Main Event. Mary, in their minds, was simply a means to an end. She did her job, and with that done, she fades into the background, no longer needed, irrelevant.

But what if that attitude is just centuries of patriarchal religion talking? What if Mary actually meant far more to the Christmas story -- and the Christian story? I recently saw on an online forum someone referencing a book that asked a pointed question: 

What if the central story of Christianity was not a man dying on a cross but a woman giving birth? 

That changes everything, doesn't it? It means Mary is no longer peripheral to the story but absolutely essential to it. Just as the Great Mother Tao gives birth to all that exists, so all women reflect its life-giving power in birthing us all into the world. Without women, human life would cease. Likewise, without Mary, there is no Jesus. That ought to count for something. 

And for those who see the connections between Mary, Sophia, and Spirit, it does. This is the secret of the Christian story hiding in plain sight. The early church fathers tell us that Jesus refers in the lost Gospel of the Hebrews to "my mother the Holy Spirit." Early Christian groups, notably those in the Syriac tradition, thought of the Holy Spirit as a feminine power and presence. Marian feast days on the Catholic liturgical calendar use passages from the Old Testament that point to Sophia, drawing parallels between the two figures. Sophia, the one who tells us she was by the Father's side during the Creation, was also once regarded in early Christian circles as the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile, the great martyred saint Maximilian Kolbe referred to Mary as a "quasi-incarnation of the Holy Spirit," and the pre-Vatican II church was often criticized for handing over the role of the Spirit to Mary. As I always say, there was a good reason for that, and not something the church should have so cavalierly abandoned. For when it did, it severed an important connection to the Sacred Feminine and reinforced a view of an all-male Trinity that left no place for the nurturing and life-giving feminine, save for subordination. That has had real-world consequences for women, and it has deprived men and women alike of something our world desperately needs. 

It needs a loving and caring Mother. A Comforter, as Jesus notably calls the Holy Spirit that he tells the apostles will be sent from on high after he departs. 

Catholic and Orthodox Christians have been reporting miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary on Earth for 2,000 years now. She almost always comes bearing a message of peace and reassurance and the importance of perseverance and faith. It's almost as if she's filling the role of... a comforter. 

As I say, the truth of the matter is hiding in plain sight for everyone to see.

Whether you take this literally or metaphorically, the same basic truth remains: Mary is here with us and has never left. And the story of Christianity began with her. 

Christmas is Mary's season, too. And that, as Gandalf would say, is an encouraging thought.

May we bear that perspective in mind as the Advent season unfolds.

Connection Overload

Public domain.

So it turns out that I'm related to 42 of the 45 men who have been President of the United States, and I'm indirectly related to the other three through blood connections to their descendants. I'm also related to most of the First Ladies. 

Apparently, this is not terribly unusual for people who can trace their ancestors back to the days of the first New England settlers -- which I can, as it turns out. In fact, I'm also a direct descendant of Myles Standish; he's my 12th great-grandfather. So I guess my people were the Mayflower people. I appear to be related to at least a dozen of the passengers. 

I found all this out because my foray into Anglo-Saxon lore got me thinking about my roots, which led me to open my old FamilySearch account and comb through the branches of my family tree. Most of all, I just wanted to know: Where did I come from? I have a troubled relationship with most of my existing family, and that often leaves me feeling alienated. And I knew next to nothing about my dad's side of the family, because I never had much contact with any of them, having been raised by my maternal grandparents. Yet I wouldn't be here if not for all of my ancestors, both the good ones and the bad ones. So I decided to try to at least get familiar with some of the names of the people who made my existence possible. 

And that got me to thinking about the lives they might have lived. Many of those who came before me probably had hard lives and had to make lots of personal sacrifices for their loved ones. Some were no doubt very brave, like those who sailed across the sea to make a new life in an unknown and untamed land. Others were just ordinary folks just trying to get by. But the sum total of all their lives led to me, this weird guy from the American Midwest who also wants the best for his family but has to struggle daily against his own body to keep going for another day. Will somebody see my name on an ancestry list hundreds of years from now and wonder what my life was like, much as I've done with the names I've encountered? Like good old Hezekiah Rush, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, christened in 1685 in jolly old England, or Keziah Wetherbee, my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, who possesses one of the greatest names I've ever heard? 

I should state that I'm well aware of the limitations of FamilySearch. It's a free site, and you get what you pay for. The ancestral connections are probably not vetted as well as they might be on other sites with premium plans. But if you just want to get a good general sense of your family background, FamilySearch isn't such a bad place to start. The Mormons have done an exemplary job in creating a wonderfully collaborative site and helping people preserve family histories and discover new connections. But before I run off and apply for membership in The Mayflower Society, I'm probably going to dig a little deeper so I can verify the links that other people have created on FamilySearch. I'm a trust-but-verify kind of guy that way. 

In any event, I trust that most of the information on FamilySearch is generally right. There might be an ancestor attached to the wrong person on a family tree here or there, or someone for whom very little documentation even exists. But I think the site probably gets the general pattern of things right. In my case, if I were related to one or two U.S. presidents, I'd probably take the connections with a grain of salt and wonder if somebody got something wrong. But when I end up related to 42 of them? Well, they can't all be wrong, and the pattern suggests that there must be something fairly reliable about all these ancestral connections that keep pointing to the same places. In my case, the vast majority of my presidential connections come through a couple of lineages on my dad's side -- which is also the side that takes me all the way back to Myles Standish and the Mayflower crew. So yeah, it just seems that I've tapped into a rich ancestral vein over there. 

For fun, I'm going to list my presidential links here, as well as those to the First Ladies where they exist. Some of these were hard to sort out, because FamilySearch will give you two different points of relationship reference if one person who's a distant cousin happens to have married one of your other distant cousins -- which, as it turns out, happens quite a lot. That's not as skeevy as it sounds when you think about just how genetically distant you are even from, say, a third cousin. Heck, you might not even have been aware you were related at all, until you start looking through family trees or you do one of those spit tests to analyze your DNA. And then you'd find that you share only 3.125% of your DNA with that third cousin. 

Also keep in mind that in the Old Days, most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born and raised. Which means they grew up around a lot of cousins. Which means that cousins got married to cousins. It happened. Same for the old royal bloodlines, where there's a lot of interfamilial inbreeding by choice, to keep the lines pure and unsullied.

Anyway, on with the presidential list. Hail to the chief, and all that.

1. George Washington: my fifth cousin nine times removed, on my dad's side.

Martha Washington: my third cousin 10 times removed, on my mom's side.

2. John Adams: my sixth cousin eight times removed, on my dad's side.

Abigail Adams: my fourth cousin eight times removed, on my dad's side.

3. Thomas Jefferson: my seventh cousin 10 times removed, on my dad's side.

Martha Jefferson: my third cousin nine times removed on my dad's side.

4. James Madison: my sixth cousin eight times removed, on my dad's side.

Dolley Madison: my fourth cousin eight times removed, on my mom's side.

5. James Monroe: my fourth cousin eight times removed, on my mom's side.

Elizabeth Monroe: my sixth cousin eight times removed, on my dad's side.

6. John Quincy Adams: my fifth cousin seven times removed, on my dad's side.

No apparent relation to Louisa Adams.

7. Andrew Jackson: my first cousin (!) eight times removed, on my dad's side.

No apparent relation to Rachel Jackson.

8. Martin Van Buren: No apparent relation to him or his wife, Hannah Van Buren. But -- and this is where things get interesting -- three of his children married my cousins, thus making Martin Van Buren's grandchildren my blood relatives. Specifically, his grandkids from these three of his children are my ninth cousins four times removed, seventh cousins six times removed, and 10th cousins four times removed. 

9. William Henry Harrison: my fourth cousin eight times removed, on my dad's side.

Anna Harrison: my seventh cousin seven times removed on my dad's side.

10. John Tyler: my fourth cousin seven times removed, on my mom's side.

Letitia Tyler: my fifth cousin eight times removed, on my mom's side.

Julia Tyler, his second wife, is my eighth cousin five times removed, on my mom's side.

11. James K. Polk: my fifth cousin six times removed, on my dad's side.

No apparent relation to Sarah Polk, although some of her siblings did marry my cousins.

12. Zachary Taylor: my fourth cousin nine times removed, on my dad's side.

Margaret Taylor: my fifth cousin eight times removed, on my dad's side.

13. Millard Fillmore: my sixth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Abigail Fillmore: my sixth cousin seven times removed, on my dad's side.

14. Franklin Pierce: my seventh cousin six times removed, on my mom's side.

Jane Pierce: my fifth cousin seven times removed, on my dad's side.

15. James Buchanan: no apparent relation, and since he was a bachelor, there's no way to connect him through a spouse. However, three of his sisters married my cousins (two on my dad's side and one on my mom's), making James Buchanan's nieces and nephews through these lines my blood relatives. They are my fifth cousins eight times removed, eighth cousins four times removed, and seventh cousins six times removed.

16. Abraham Lincoln: my seventh cousin six times removed, on my dad's side.

Mary Todd Lincoln: my ninth cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

17. Andrew Johnson: my ninth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Eliza Johnson: my eighth cousin six times removed, on my dad's side.

18. Ulysses Grant: my sixth cousin seven times removed, on my dad's side. 

Julia Grant: my eighth cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

19. Rutherford Hayes: my eighth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Lucy Hayes: my eighth cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

20. James Garfield: my seventh cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Lucretia Garfield: my sixth cousin six times removed, on my dad's side. 

21. Chester Arthur, for whom my maternal great-grandfather was named: my eighth cousin six times removed, on my dad's side (not my mom's, alas).

Ellen Arthur: technically never a First Lady, as she died before President Arthur assumed office. Still, she is my sixth cousin five times removed, on my mom's side. 

22 (and technically 24, but let's not count the same person twice): Grover Cleveland: my 11th cousin on my dad's side.

Frances Cleveland: my sixth cousin four times removed, on my dad's side.

23. Benjamin Harrison: my sixth cousin six times removed, on my dad's side.

Mary Harrison: my sixth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

24. William McKinley: my seventh cousin five times removed, on my mom's side.

Ida McKinley: my 10th cousin twice removed, on my dad's side.

25. Teddy Roosevelt: my eighth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Alice Roosevelt: my seventh cousin four times removed, on my dad's side.

26. William Howard Taft: my seventh cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Nellie Taft: my 11th cousin once removed, on my dad's side.

27. Woodrow Wilson: my eighth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Edith Wilson: my seventh cousin four times removed, on my mom's side.

28. Warren Harding: my seventh cousin four times removed, on my mom's side.

Florence Harding: my 11th cousin once removed, on my dad's side.

29. Calvin Coolidge: my seventh cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

Grace Anna Coolidge: my seventh cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

30. Herbert Hoover: my 10th cousin twice removed, on my dad's side.

Lou Henry Hoover: my ninth cousin twice removed, on my dad's side. 

31. Franklin Roosevelt: my sixth cousin six times removed, on my dad's side.

Eleanor Roosevelt: my eighth cousin three times removed, on my mom's side.

32. Harry Truman: my eighth cousin four times removed, on my mom's side.

Bess Truman: my 10th cousin once removed on my dad's side.

33. Dwight Eisenhower: my sixth cousin five times removed, on my dad's side.

Mamie Eisenhower: my 10th cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

34. John Kennedy: my ninth cousin four times removed, on my dad's side.

Jackie Kennedy: my 11th cousin three times removed, on my mom's side.

35.  Lyndon Johnson: my seventh cousin twice removed, on my mom's side.

Lady Bird Johnson: my seventh cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

36. Richard Nixon: my seventh cousin three times removed, on my mom's side.

No apparent relation to Pat Nixon, but her brother did marry my eighth cousin three times removed on my dad's side.

37. Gerald Ford: my eighth cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

Betty Ford: my 11th cousin twice removed, on my dad's side.

38. Jimmy Carter: my 12th cousin, on my dad's side. It's harder to piece together connections for people still living, because they're generally not publicly listed on the genealogy sites for privacy reasons. However, their deceased relatives are listed, and in this case I was able to see that Jimmy Carter's father, James Sr., was my 11th cousin once removed, and James Sr.'s mother, Nina Carter, was my 10th cousin twice removed. From there it's a simple matter of doing the generational math. 

Rosalynn Carter: my 10th cousin once removed, on my dad's side.

39. Ronald Reagan: my 10th cousin twice removed, on my mom's side.

Nancy Reagan: my 10th cousin once removed, on my dad's side. That makes Patti Davis and Ron Reagan either my 11th cousins or my 11th cousins once removed, depending on whether you count through Ronald or Nancy.

Although she was never a First Lady, Jane Wyman was my eighth cousin three times removed on my dad's side.

40. George Bush: my ninth cousin three times removed, on my dad's side.

Barbara Bush: my ninth cousin twice removed, on my dad's side.

41. Bill Clinton: my seventh cousin five times removed on my dad's side, counting from Bill Clinton's dad, but also my 10th cousin once removed on my dad's side, counting from Bill Clinton's mom. Both of his parents were my cousins.

Hillary Clinton: my 14th cousin, on my dad's side, based on available information for her mother and grandmother. 

42. George W. Bush: my 10th cousin on my dad's side, twice removed through GWB's dad and once removed through GWB's mom, since they're also both my cousins.

Laura Bush: my eighth cousin twice removed, on my mom's side, based on available information for her father and grandfather. 

43. Barack Obama: my ninth cousin once removed on my dad's side. His mom, Stanley Ann Dunham, is my ninth cousin. Her mom is my eighth cousin once removed, and her mom is my seventh cousin twice removed. So I just calculated forward. 

No apparent relation to Michelle Obama.

44. Donald Trump: only the third president to whom I couldn't trace a direct lineage. But his brother, Fred Trump Jr., did marry my 10th cousin twice removed on my dad's side, Linda Lea Clapp. Her dad is listed as my ninth cousin three times removed. That means Mary Trump and Fred Trump III, The Donald's niece and nephew, are my 11th cousins once removed. 

Likewise, Marla Maples, Trump's second wife, is my seventh cousin once removed on my dad's side, based on her dad's listed relationship to me as my sixth cousin twice removed. That means Tiffany Ariana Trump, Marla Maples' daughter with DJT, is my eighth cousin.

I couldn't find any connection to Ivana or Melania Trump.

45. Joe Biden: my 11th cousin three times removed on my dad's side, based on what I could find about his parents and grandparents. 

Jill Biden: my 12th cousin once removed on my dad's side, based on what I could find about her mother's family tree.

And there you have it. It ultimately counts for nothing besides bragging rights, but it's kind of fun to see the connections and look back through the family trees. Most of the ancestors I have in common with these historical figures go back into the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and I guess I just ended up with a lucky roll of the genealogical dice that my ancestors were early settlers in New England. There's some Scottish and English nobility mixed in there as well if I dig further back, and that's also a bonus because it means better recordkeeping and preservation, as opposed to whatever spotty information may have survived, or was even written down in the first place, for children of the common folk. 

I spent a couple of nights clicking through links and taking notes to collect all the presidential information. I could go even deeper, and I probably will when I have the time. But at the outset, all I wanted to do was satisfy my curiosity once I began to see some links between me and the earliest Americans. 

It actually all started when I was trying to see if I could discover a link between me and Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. My last name is Rush, by way of being adopted by my maternal grandparents of that name, and my Great-Grandpa Rush often told us that we were related to the famous Pennsylvania physician. Well, my younger cousin (my niece by way of my adoption -- terms get weird when you're adopted within the family) did some family-tree research a few years ago and found out that our particular line of Rushes came not from England, as Dr. Benjamin Rush's did, but from Germany, where our last name was spelled Rusch. That meant a link to the doctor was unlikely. And sure enough, I've been unable to establish one.

What I did find, though, was that Dr. Rush's wife, Julia Stockton, is related to me. She's my 13th cousin -- on my dad's side, as in the not-Rush side. Well, how about that? Even funnier is that the only English Rushes I've found in my family tree -- the aforementioned Hezekiah Rush among them -- are also on my dad's not-Rush side. Crazy. 

But even though I can't claim Dr. Rush as an ancestor, my blood connection to his wife means that his children are my relatives -- my 13th cousins once removed. And that counts for something. 

And in any event, I got some decent consolation prizes for not being related to old Doctor Ben. There were many more great men at the Continental Congress in that summer of 1776 to whom I can claim a connection. In total, and if the data is accurate, I'm related to 34 of the 56 signers -- just, ironically, not the guy who shares my last name. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are, of course, two of the signers I'm related to. Then there's John Hancock, my fifth cousin eight times removed on my dad's side. And the icing on the cake for me is that I get to claim a blood connection to one of the greatest Americans of them all, Benjamin Franklin. He's my third cousin 11 times removed, also on my dad's side. His great-great-grandfather, Thomas Franklin, is my 13th great-grandfather. Learning about that connection really made my day.

As you can imagine, I kind of got obsessed with wanting to see what other connections I could make. If all these famous people were tied to me by blood, who else was? FamilySearch offered some suggestions for names I could investigate, and others I tried out on my own. And no matter which path I went down, it seemed as if every almost every person whose name I entered -- not every single one, in fairness, but definitely the vast majority -- ended up being some kind of distant relation. 

Henry David Thoreau? Yep. Fifth cousin seven times removed on my dad's side.

Walt Whitman? Eleventh cousin, dad's side.

Lewis Carroll? Eighth cousin six times removed, dad's side.

Edgar Allan Poe? Sixth cousin six times removed, mom's side.

Mark Twain? Seventh cousin five times removed, dad's side.

Herman Melville? Fifth cousin seven times removed, dad's side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson? Tenth cousin twice removed, dad's side.

You can see where my interests lie. The more literary connections I can make, the happier I am.

I dipped my toe into the music scene:

Janis Joplin: Ninth cousin once removed, dad's side.

Gordon Lightfoot: Thirteenth cousin once removed, dad's side.

How about some of my personal heroes? Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy, the dynamic duo of Catholic Worker fame, perhaps?

Dorothy Day: Eighth cousin four times removed, dad's side.

Ammon Hennacy: Tenth cousin four times removed, mom's side. 

But it didn't end there. These were some of FamilySearch's suggestions: 

Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon: Tenth cousin four times removed, mom's side.

Babe Ruth: Seventh cousin five times removed, mom's side.

Gordie Howe: Ninth cousin three times removed, dad's side. (My Red Wings fan of a wife will love this one.)

Samuel F.B. Morse: ... . ...- . -. - .... / -.-. --- ..- ... .. -. / ..-. --- ..- .-. / - .. -- . ... / .-. . -- --- ...- . -.. --..-- / -.. .- -.. .----. ... / ... .. -.. . .-.-.-

George Harrison: Tenth cousin twice removed, dad's side. A Beatle relative!

Lucille Ball: Eighth cousin three times removed, dad's side.

Elvis (are you kidding me?): Eighth cousin twice removed, dad's side.

Princess Diana: Eleventh cousin once removed, mom's side.

It went on and on. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Johnny Cash, Norman Rockwell, Oliver Cromwell, Amelia Earhart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Susan B. Anthony, Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II, and many more.

And then came the absolute jaw-dropper, for me, anyway: 

Marilyn Monroe. 

Eighth cousin three times removed, dad's side.

I'll never look at her the same way again. 

At this point, I was getting seriously creeped out to so suddenly learn that I'm apparently related to all these well-known people. With some trepidation, I shifted to people who've touched my life personally. The same thing happened.

The husband and wife who built the stately 19th-century house that I grew up in on the Michigan prairie -- guess what? I'm related to both of them. Levi Beckwith Jr. is my fifth cousin seven times removed on my mom's side, and his wife, Lucy Markham, is my seventh cousin four times removed on my dad's side. Their families settled in colonial America and migrated westward, leaving a connection to me along the way. And my family eventually moved into their house, completing the circle.

And then, finally, there's the name that I entered just for fun, not really expecting to get a hit. Surely, if my best childhood friend and I were related, I would have known. You could have knocked me over with a feather when his grandma showed up on my family tree. She was our next-door neighbor when I was a kid. And yet somehow, neither one of us ever had any idea when we were growing up together that we were actually eighth cousins. I'm related to my first best friend in life through my mom's side.

At that point, I had to stop plugging in names and step away. It was all getting to be too much. Everything I thought I knew was being turned upside-down. 

I haven't talked in depth to anyone who does genealogical research, so I don't have a good sense for how common it is to find that you're related to pretty much everybody you can think of. Maybe it's my colonial ancestry that gives me such an abundance of connections. But even going back before that time, into the mists of history, I was unearthing royal lineages in places as far-flung as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Supposedly, I even descend from the Merovingian line, through King Clovis I himself. But I definitely need to do far more in-depth research before I'll believe that. Even the smallest error that could creep in after 1,500 years of recordkeeping could derail the entire connection. 

Still, the point remains that finding all these significant connections felt overwhelming to me. I don't really know what to do with the information. 

Granted, the further you travel back in time, the greater chance you have of discovering even a tenuous connection to somebody. Go back far enough, and we're all related. I recently read with interest an article making the case that within a given ethnic group, everybody is likely to be no more distant than a 15th cousin, and that the majority of humans are at most 50th cousins to each other. So if I don't appear to be related to Dr. Benjamin Rush, it's probably only because FamilySearch stops calculating lineages for you at the 15th generation. If I dug in and researched the old-fashioned way -- by tracking down physical documents in obscure dusty archives and the like -- chances are I'd eventually find some kind of connection. 

When you look at it that way, all these "famous" connections start to feel a lot less special. The relationships are ultimately inevitable. It just becomes a question of tracking down the missing puzzle pieces and then finding where they fit. 

Still, it is kind of neat, in a bragging-rights kind of way, to find a connection to you that is, in a big-picture sense, still pretty intimate and fairly unlikely. Marilyn Monroe and I, as eighth cousins, share a common grandparent out of a pool of just 512 human beings. That's not a whole lot in the grand scheme. 

On the other hand, I only make a big deal out of my connection to her because I've always found Marilyn to be one of the most beautiful creatures to ever walk the face of the earth. Gerald Ford is also my eighth cousin three times removed, just like Marilyn, and while that's interesting to me, I have to admit that I don't really care that I'm related to a clumsy guy with a receding hairline who only became president because his boss and the guy he replaced were crooks.

Then there's Joanne Emerson. Born in 1923, and at some point in her life lived in Nebraska. That's all I know about her, and it's probably all I ever will know. Chances are she was never known outside of the same circle of close friends and relatives that we all have as we journey through life. I just happened to find her by following a random branch on my FamilySearch tree. She's also my eighth cousin three times removed. I could have followed a different branch and found a completely different person to make the same point. 

And the point is that Marilyn Monroe, Gerald Ford, and Joanne Emerson from Nebraska are all my eighth cousins three times removed. They're all people of equal relation to me. So why don't I assign equal importance to them in my personal headspace? Because in the end, it's all subjective. It just boils down to what things you choose to care about and give your attention to. And besides, it's not like having famous relatives is something you chose. You just happen to have some people on your family tree that did stuff that people outside of your family tree know about. That's it. Sure, it's kind of fun to go around saying, "Hey, I'm related to so-and-so," but being proud of your blood connections, as if it somehow makes you a better person, is kind of like being proud of your ethnicity. It's something you have no control over. You never had any say in the matter. It's just the way things shook out.   

I guess if I take something constructive away from all these fascinating discoveries, it's that it really is a small world when you get down to it. When two people in medieval England decided to have a baby, it may not have seemed significant at the time to anyone but them and their immediate family. But the web of Wyrd (remember we talked about that?) reminds us that the smallest ripple in one place affects everything else in the web, even if we can barely perceive it at the moment. Every action we take, every choice we make, sends the web in a new direction, until even more cumulative effects send it vibrating toward yet another destination. And when that English couple had a baby 500 years ago, they set a ripple in motion that resulted in me. If any of their descendants in between them and me had made a different life choice, I wouldn't be here writing this. 

That's extremely humbling to me, and it fills me with gratitude -- because even though my life is pretty hard some days, I'm still grateful that I'm here and I get to experience life for a brief flash of 60 or 70 or 80 years on this planet, before I have to say goodbye and leave my name behind for some future genealogically minded descendant to discover.  

I can only hope that person will look at my name with as much wonder and curiosity as I did when I found Keziah Wetherbee and wondered what she was like. Hopefully we can leave behind good stories that our descendants can attach to those names. 

That's our true legacy. 

The Art of Letting Go

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash.

At the time, I didn't think that a simple graphic would start the ball rolling for me toward an even deeper feeling of alienation from a large contingent of Abrahamic believers. Yet here we are. 

On Twitter, someone recently created a graphical representation breaking down support for current geopolitical causes based on where you land on the political spectrum. The user observed that the far ends of the spectrum share their support for Palestine and Russia over Israel and Ukraine in the battles raging on the world stage. Here's the graphic, along with what the user had to say about each segment of support along the spectrum.

Although I think the user mischaracterizes and oversimplifies to some extent the people who belong to each segment, I do agree with his observation on horseshoe theory, the idea that politics doesn't exist on a straight line but rather curves in on itself the farther out you go. The left and right fringes may share the same political goals; they just differ in their reasons and see different solutions to the problems we face. What fascinated me about this was that I was seeing a divide growing on the U.S. political right in the aftermath of Hamas' early October offensive against Israel, and this graphic, along with the user's commentary, characterized the split in easily understandable terms: Trumpers support Israel, while conservatives who aren't part of the MAGA contingent don't. 

And why is that? In part it's because Trumpers want to support a U.S. ally. But what it really boils down to is that evangelical Christians overwhelmingly support Trump, and evangelical Christians uncritically support Israel because they believe every skirmish in the Middle East that involves Israel is a fulfillment of end-times prophecy. In other words, if Israel is under attack, it must mean Jesus is coming soon. And that means, in their minds, that Jesus will hit the ground with a vengeance, Rambo-style, wiping the filth off the face of the planet and creating a new paradise on Earth with his chosen ones. This is really what they believe. Ask an evangelical and find out. If you've ever wondered why these folks aren't horrified by the blood-soaked pages of genocide that litter the Old Testament, it's because that's how they think Jesus will be -- as vengeful and wrathful as the Old Testament God who either wiped out billions of human beings himself or ordered their destruction through his foot soldiers on Earth. No wonder they give so little regard to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus exhorts us to love our enemies and calls both the merciful and the peacemakers blessed.

What you end up with is a significant contingent of the American populace supporting the furtherance of U.S.-led domination of the planet through the violence of the military-industrial complex. In short, evangelicals are enablers of misery, murder, and empire. 

Just take a moment and ask yourself why the U.S. establishment supports Israel and demands that you do as well, liberally applying propaganda and censorship toward that end as it deems necessary. It has very little to do with the Israeli people and a whole lot to do with geopolitical dominance and power. Israel's interests are our interests, and it doesn't matter if we need to burn some other nation or group of people to the ground in order to protect those interests. Likewise, why do you think the establishment cares about Ukraine so much? It's not that anyone in power actually cares about Ukraine. It's that Ukraine is a convenient proxy through which to carry out a war on Russia and preserve U.S. and Western economic and military hegemony. 

If that doesn't make sense, I think this following graphic, which was in the comments of that Twitter post, really drives the point home: 

Do you support Ukraine and Israel? Then you're a useful idiot for the perpetuation of U.S. imperialism. You swallow the propaganda and do as you're told. Support Israel and Russia? Then you support bullies picking on smaller opponents. Sums up the worldview of a lot of Trumpers. But what about the top right? "Fully understands the core of international geopolitics," states the graphic. Yeah, that's me. 

And let's make one thing abundantly clear: You don't actually have to "support" any of these groups. You just have to see what it means to find yourself on one side or the other of these conflicts. Ukraine is a puppet of the West teeming with neo-Nazis. Russia is hostile toward free expression. Israel operates an apartheid government, treats its neighbors like animals, and kills men, women, and children indiscriminately. The Palestinians engage in terrorism in the name of Allah. It is possible for there to be no good guys in all of this. There doesn't always have to be a black-or-white, good-or-bad choice. 

Me, I'm just sick of seeing people suffer for the sake of preserving American empire. But I'm also sick of seeing three groups of people who believe in the same deity endlessly advocating so much hatred and violence, including against each other. In the case of the Israel-Hamas comflict, all I see are the once-oppressed Jews now acting as the oppressor, slaughtering people in spite of Moses' commandment not to kill. I see Muslims who in turn murder in the name of the same Abrahamic deity. And I see American believers in the same deity cheering on the Israelis' actions. 

For me, it's become abundantly clear that the vast majority of people who call themselves Christians will never do unto others, never become peacemakers, never stop hating. 

For years, I've been trying to hold on to some thread of the faith I was raised in. There's much I like about Catholicism. I find the church buildings beautiful and inspiring, I love the history and traditions and time-honored rituals, and I find the core story of Christianity a comforting one. But I've always struggled to take any of it on a literal level. I don't know that we ever were supposed to take it literally. I think it was meant to speak to something deep within us, in order to humble us and give us a feeling of connection to something bigger than ourselves.

But it hasn't done that, has it? Instead, it has filled its followers with holy righteousness and rage. Believing they're on the side of God, Christians engaged in the bloody Crusades, persecuted people through the Inquisition, and cavalierly murdered anyone deemed a pagan, a heretic, or a witch. They've even killed each other over doctrinal disagreements. Where does it end? 

I've lately held on to my religious heritage because I thought that at the very least, traditional Catholicism would be a good ally to have in the fight against the societal cancer of wokeness. But at what cost? I know of people online who've made the jump from woke to devout Christian, and the only thing they really seem to have done is to trade one mind virus for another. The common denominator is that they seem to need someone to organize their thoughts for them, even if those thoughts are rooted in absurdities -- things that you could never believe unless you were indoctrinated into them, usually at an early age, when your mind is most impressionable. 

This is especially true of evangelical fundamentalism and the frequent naive, simplistic, black-and-white childishness its adherents portray. It springs from the exact same mindset that wokeness does, a mindset that will have people clinging to the most ridiculous ideas imaginable in a desperate attempt to find meaning in the world and feel important. They ultimately both stem from egoic desire and are exacerbated by our deepest irrational impulses and what frequently amounts to a fundamental emotional immaturity. And let's face it: If a religious person's most persuasive argument for joining his or her clique is "you'll be sorry on judgment day if you don't" -- which is what it almost always boils down to when you press a Christian, especially an evangelical one, hard enough -- then you've lost the argument right from the outset. I don't respond to threats.

I'm not necessarily advocating for atheism, mind you. Deities may or may not exist, and I won't know until I'm dead. None of us will. 

I don't say any of this lightly. I'm a minister, and I earned a Th.D. from an online seminary. I'm fascinated by religion and spirituality. I probably always will be. For a long time I've been seriously considering going one step further and receiving holy orders to become a full-fledged priest. But evangelicals and hidebound literalists make it harder and harder to want to have anything to do with the whole mess.

One reason I've clung on, however loosely, to the tenets of the faith of my upbringing was that I was wrapped up in the idea that maybe we had to hold on to these foundational Judeo-Christian ideas for the sake of the survival of Western civilization, But maybe what we have needs to fall away. Maybe it's too far gone and can't be fixed. Maybe it shouldn't be fixed. Maybe we should just brace for whatever's coming, without regard to what we think can or should be saved. These things are mostly out of the control of the ordinary, average person anyway. Maybe you should just do the best you can while history unfolds and does whatever it's going to do. Maybe that's all any of us can do, in the end.

With all that said, I do still believe there's some greater purpose and meaning to our existence. My intuition tells me that we're not alone in a hostile universe. I just don't think we know, or even can know, what might be out there. I don't think we could ever hope to wrap our brains around it. Our religions are just our feeble attempts to grasp at straws, to try to find some certainty in an existence that tends to offer us more questions than answers. Our religions aren't the Truth, as much as we might want them to be. They're only the fingers pointing at the moon. 

On that point, perhaps Jiddu Krishnamurti was right that "truth is a pathless land." But as much as I admire Krishnamurti, I think that he perhaps too lightly dismissed just how tribally minded people are. He believed that peace would come once humanity abandoned its attachments to everything, because to attach to something is to inherently separate yourself from some other part of humanity that doesn't share your attachment, which means that attachment inevitably leads to conflict and violence. And he may have been right about that. But I'm not convinced anymore that humans can live like that, embracing a state of pure choicelessness in every aspect of their lives. I'm not even sure it's healthy to live like that. Tribalism, like our deep-seated religious impulse, seems to be hardwired into us. These things play into our survival instinct. The tribe protects us, and religion keeps us from going insane in the face of the awareness of our own mortality. No man is an island, and in the end, that's probably for the best. We just need to be able to find a place where our tribes and our beliefs are enough in themselves to keep us from wanting to do battle with others who see the world differently.    

And if our religious beliefs don't give us that sense of peace, then we're doing something wrong. And that's not religion's fault as much as it is our fault. But sometimes you're just going to find that a particular religion's adherents are making things worse, not better. 

That's when you have to decide whether it's time to simply let go. 

Ranking the U.S. State Flags: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I’ve always been intrigued by symbols and the things they convey. I’m also fascinated by flag designs — and what are flags but really big symbols of ideas that organizations, communities, and nations want to wordlessly convey?

There’s actually a field dedicated to the study of flags: vexillology. That word is a hybrid of the Greek suffix -logia, meaning “study,” and the Latin word vexillum, which refers to a type of military standard carried in the ranks of the Roman military: Think of a banner hanging from a horizontal post.

There’s even an organization dedicated to the study of flags: The North American Vexillological Association, or NAVA. And yeah, the people in this group are every bit as nerdy as I am about this stuff. One of their members has even put together a list of guidelines for what constitutes good flag design, and I think they’re pretty good rules of thumb, especially in light of how many flags violate some or all of these rules and, well, don’t look very good. Here they are:

1. Keep it simple. Could a child draw the flag without any trouble? Then you probably have a good design.  

 

2. Use meaningful symbols. Quite simply, make sure your flag clearly relates to what it’s intended to represent.  

 

3. Use only two or three colors. In general, pick standard colors and make sure they contrast in a pleasing way. 

 

4. No letters, numbers, or seals. It’s a flag, not a billboard. 

 

5. Be distinct or be related. Don’t copy other designs, but also don’t hesitate to suggest connections if there are any.

These make intuitive sense to me. As middle-aged straight white dudes go, I seem to have an eye for good design. It’s long been the running joke in our family that I’m the one in the house with an eye for colors and patterns and symmetry. I’ll bet I could scratch out a living as an interior designer if push ever came to shove.

This eye for design extends, I think, to flags. I love a well-designed flag — the way the colors work together, the way the symbols express meaning without saying a word, and so on. And I’ve always been interested in how flags can stir up such powerful emotions in so many people. Think of how Americans revere the Stars and Stripes, sometimes to the point of near worship. Or, conversely, think of the visceral reaction people have to the Nazi flag. Aesthetically speaking, it’s actually not an offensive flag, but it’s the hatred and violence associated with it that makes a lot of people understandably recoil in its sight. Jung did extensive work into examining the power that symbols possess for humans; they seem to tap into something very deep and instinctual within us by bypassing words and the logical mind. And I think the strong emotions flags stir up in people suggest that Jung was correct in his observations. 

Personally, I’m quite fond of the symbolism of the Cascadia flag. It’s meant to signify a bioregion that encompasses the northwestern United States and parts of Canada, united not by political borders but by natural boundaries like mountain ranges and waterways. It’s a tricolor flag, with its white stripe symbolizing clouds and snow-capped peaks, green symbolizing the lush grasses and abundant trees, and blue symbolizing the clear skies and sparkling bodies of water. Overlapping all of them is the silhouette of a Douglas fir, representing the power, steadfastness, and resilience of nature. I’ve loved the Doug flag, as it’s called, from the moment I saw it, and I fly one from our porch every day.

I also took the initiative to design a flag for a micronation. If you’re unfamiliar, micronations are sort of vanity secession projects, whereby people declare independence from the nation or state they’re living in. They’re usually done tongue in cheek, just for fun or for a way to make a political statement, though there have been some actual separatist micronation movements over the years. Anyway, my flag looks like this:

Similar to the Cascadia flag, I intended for the green to symbolize the natural world and the “green” ecological movement; and the blue to symbolize the sky and the water, but also individual liberty (commonly associated with blue) and the heavens above (in a mystical sense). The white disc is the moon, a traditional symbol of the sacred feminine, which has always been an important part of my spiritual life. Finally, the diagonal line represents both the hill directly behind our house and the hills that surround our valley in general. But it’s also a nod to the family of anarchist flags, all of which feature a diagonal line that splits them into two colors: black for anarchism, and the second color for whatever particular “flavor” of anarchism we’re talking about. And to be clear, yes, I am sympathetic to anarchism, and no, anarchism probably isn’t quite what you think it is. More on that another time.

Anyway, with Independence Day coming up, one of those days when Americans love to wave their Stars and Stripes, I thought it would be a fun time to take a look at some flags that don’t always get a lot of love, standing as they do in the perpetual shadow of Old Glory: our 50 state flags. I’ll admit that, from a design point of view, a whole lot of them are ugly. But there are some gems, too, that I think will make the exercise an enjoyable one. We were talking in our house about working up a homeschooling assignment that involved the 50 state flags, and that’s what initially prompted me to take a closer look at them.

So let’s jump in.

50. Minnesota

Minnesota’s flag suffers from the same problem that more than half of America’s state flags do. It’s what vexillologists disparagingly call a “seal on a bedsheet” — in other words, a state seal or coat of arms on a solid-colored background. If flags should be recognizable from a distance, putting a state seal on a flag defeats that purpose, since these seals usually have very fine details that you can’t see unless you’re right on top of the flag. Moreover, when so many states have taken the same approach to their flags, with seals on backgrounds that are mostly solid blue, you end up with one state flag that looks indistinguishable from another.

This flag happens to be a lighter shade of blue than many of the other seal-on-a-bedsheet state flags, so at least it stands out slightly in that regard. But what puts it at the bottom of the list for me is that it’s just way too cluttered. Your eye has no idea where to go. The dots circling the outer ring of the seal are an unnecessary adornment, and then the little stars that protrude out from the dots, forming the points of a larger unseen star, confuse matters even further. That blue ring inside the dots contains a floral motif that further messes up the view, and it doesn’t help that the seal itself is far too busy. I see a sunrise, mountains, trees, plains, water, an Indian on horseback, and a farmer tilling the ground. That’s just too much.

As far as the NAVA’s suggestion of two to three colors goes? I see a minimum of six here: green, blue, white, orange, red, and brown.

From a distance, the whole thing in the center of the flag actually looks like either a life preserver or a bowl of soup. Just zoom out on the picture to see what I mean. Not good.

And then there’s the writing, which unfortunately affects the majority of state flags. There’s a motto, the name of the state, and no less than three dates — 1819, 1858, and 1893.

The thing that designs like this get wrong is a failure to understand that a flag is not a sign. It’s meant to be a collection of symbols that communicate something about the place it represents, something that has the potential to convey meaning to even someone who knows nothing about that place. And Minnesota’s flag tells me absolutely nothing about Minnesota. Scores of state flags include pictures of natural landscapes, farming, commerce, and the like on their seals. After a while, they all start to blur together and look the same. Minnesota’s flag, accordingly, just gets lost in a sea of sameness.

So how could Minnesota try to stand out? Here’s one idea: Given the state’s Scandinavian heritage, it could easily riff on the Nordic crosses seen on the flags of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.

For better or worse, though, that’s not likely to happen. The Minnesota legislature is considering a replacement for the state flag, so that’s good news. The potential problematic news, from a design perspective, is that any proposed new flag has to represent the state’s “diverse cultural communities,” while “symbols, emblems, or likenesses that represent only a single community” will be prohibited. That the legislature doesn’t appear to want any kind of single unifying symbol to bring the people of the state together sets up any design committee with the monumental, and potentially impossible, task of jamming in so many elements that the state could well end up with just as big of a cluttered mess as it has now. The hideous-looking pride flag, on which everyone in seeming perpetuity gets to add yet another dizzying stripe or a clashing color, comes immediately to mind.

49. Nebraska

All you need to know about the awfulness of this flag design is that it once flew upside-down over the state capitol for 10 days and no one noticed. It’s literally just the state seal, two-toned — yellow and white — on a blue background. The design is indistinguishable from a distance (and not much better close up) and obviously conveys nothing unique about the state. The seal depicts a man hammering an anvil, a frontier cabin by the water, bundles of wheat, a steamboat, and a train in the shadow of distant mountains. That could just as easily be a scene of Minnesota, or practically any other state.

48. Kansas

The Kansas flag reminds me of one of those old Geocities pages where the person who put it together centered every element and called it good enough. At the top you have a sunflower. Under it, there’s another state seal, once again depicting mountains, farmland, and water — but this time, you also get a few covered wagons and a couple of Indians chasing down some bison. And under the seal, in a blocky all-caps typeface, is the word KANSAS.

Remember, you want to avoid putting words on flags. In this case, if you have to shout the name of your state on your flag, that’s a pretty good indication that your design has failed to tell anyone anything about your state. The identity of your state should go without saying — literally — solely from the symbols you employ.

For example, Kansas is known for its sunflowers, so why not simply put a sunflower on the flag? That’s what the state banner does, and it conveys more about the character of Kansas than the state flag ever will.

The Kansas state banner, according to Wikipedia.

47. Montana

Same thing as with Kansas: We get the state name in all caps, and a state seal that could be depicting a landscape from practically anywhere in the nation. It only edges out Kansas because at least Montana didn’t try to squeeze in a third prominent design element, like a cow or something.

46. Wisconsin

Not only does Wisconsin’s flag shout the state’s name, but it also shouts the date the state was admitted to the union. I placed it above Montana only because the use of the coat of arms instead of the state seal at least gives us something besides another vague landscape scene to look at — but there are still far too many design elements happening, none of which could ever be seen clearly at a distance. 

It is kind of cool that there’s a badger hanging out on top of the coat of arms, though. Maybe the badger should be the only thing on the flag. Barring that, how about a wedge of cheese or a mug of beer? (Just kidding, but barely.)

45. Idaho

The flag of my state is just bad. Not only does it feature another way-too-busy state seal, but it displays the name of the state twice. And the seal itself isn’t content to give us one landscape scene — it offers us a second one, in a shield at the center of the image.

The one redeeming quality is that the woman in the seal, representing liberty and justice, holds aloft a Phrygian cap, an ancient symbol of liberty that was strongly associated with both the American and French revolutions. The cap appears on a few other state flags, and in those cases it’s pretty much the only redeeming quality too.

Surely Idaho can improve on this flag. I realize that most people associate Idaho with potatoes, but if we ever got a flag redesign, I’d like to think we could do better than going from a nondescript state seal to a lowly spud. There must be a happy medium somewhere.

44. Illinois

There’s a lot of federal imagery here, on what is Illinois’ state seal. But that’s not the problem so much as how shockingly amateurish the entire design is. It seriously looks like a child drew it.

43. Delaware

Delaware is really only known for three things: giving us Joe Biden, functioning as a tax haven for businesses, and being the first state to ratify the Constitution. So I suppose it’s not surprising that it would want to boast the date of its ratification on its flag, even if it’s not really the place to do so.

The drab colors are supposed to mimic George Washington’s uniform, which I guess is a noble gesture, but I’m not so sure they make the best flag colors. Within the coat of arms (yes, another one), the farmer and the soldier appear to be looking rather confusedly at each other, while an ear of corn and a sheaf of wheat float on a shield between them. But I can’t help noticing the blue, white, and green stripes below that. It’s as if someone took the Cascadia flag and replaced the Douglas fir with a cow. I sort of like that, in a humorous way. But who associates cows with Delaware?

42. New Jersey

It’s partly the color scheme that lands this one so low. Is the field beige? Yellow? Either way, it’s not pleasant to look at. The flag does score a few points for the Phrygian cap being held aloft by the woman on the left, and the inclusion of the horse’s head is weird and random enough to make you wonder whether this is supposed to be the emblem of a state, a family crest, or a sign that the knight is the favorite piece among New Jersey chess players. 

Other than that, why put three plows on the shield? Just one would have gotten the agricultural message across just fine.

41. New York

There’s something strangely endearing about the aggressively imperialist vibe this flag throws off. I think it’s mainly the eagle menacingly perched atop the globe, suggestive of America’s seemingly insatiable desire to rule and control the world. But even the prominent placement of the two robed women standing regally on either side of the shield makes this feel like an image you could have seen in ancient Rome. Meanwhile, we have another Phrygian cap, which is a plus, held by a woman who also has her foot on a crown, symbolic of throwing off the British monarchy.

So, essentially, you have a flag whose images represent American liberty, independence, and victory over tyranny, while simultaneously expressing a national desire to go out and dominate the planet, just like the empire we freed ourselves from.

Only in New York.      

40. Pennsylvania

As the seals-on-bedsheets go, the horses at least make this flag visually distinct from the rest. The shield between the horses, though, depicts just more interchangeable images of agriculture and seafaring. And the eagle seems altogether unnecessary. One wonders why Pennsylvania wouldn’t put the instantly recognizable keystone on its flag, instead of a coat of arms that tells you nothing about the state’s character.

Something like this. (Not my design, though.)

39. West Virginia

The blue border makes it look like someone tried to frame the flag, which is kind of odd. We get yet another uninteresting coat of arms here, though the Phrygian cap lying atop two crossed rifles is a unique touch. But overall, the flag is too busy and the details are too small. The whole thing sort of reminds me of the kind of drawing you’d find on a cigar band.

38. Virginia

Virginia’s flag wins points simply for being so badass: Virtue, personified and bare-breasted, holding a sword and spear, stands atop the vanquished dead body of a king, his crown cast aside. Below them both is the motto “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” or “thus ever to tyrants.” The design isn’t all that hot, but the sentiment captures everything great about both the American Revolution and the ideals of the spirit of liberty the nation was founded upon.

37. Vermont

There’s not much difference between the flags of Vermont and Maine, listed next. Here we get another coat of arms, and the simplicity of this one is a bit of a welcome change. Remove the deer head, the cow, and the wheat bales, and you’d be left with a nice, uncluttered image of a single pine tree standing tall and proud against a mountainous backdrop — kind of like the Cascadia flag. All the same, it really doesn’t convey anything special about the state.

An alternative flag associated with Vermont is that of the Green Mountain Boys, currently used by the Vermont National Guard and also tied to a group that wants to see Vermont secede from the United States and return to being its own country, as it was from 1777 to 1791. It’s not actually known what the Green Mountain Boys’ flag looked like, aside from the canton of stars that still exists from an original flag. The re-creation is therefore a fanciful best guess, but it sure looks better than Vermont’s current flag. If the state ever wanted to revisit its flag design, it could do far worse than to adopt the Green Mountain Boys’ flag.

Not sure why the stars are so haphazardly sized and distributed.

36. Maine

When you think of Maine, you probably think of remote, cold forests. At least I do. So having an evergreen — with a moose resting under it, no less — front and center in the coat of arms at least makes a little bit of sense here.

The farmer and the seafarer are kind of pointless and non-specific to Maine, but they sort of work as part of the overall design, which is very much of its time — the flag was adopted in 1909, and it looks like it. Just look at the old-timey typeface used for the word “Maine” on the woodcut-style blue banner. Between that and the jaunty placement of the word “Dirigo” (Latin for “I lead”) on the red ribbon up top, just below the shining star, it almost looks like a label design you might see on something like an old box of borax or a sardine can. Or maybe it just makes me think of Barilla pasta. Dirigo elbow macaroni, BOGO today at your Caribou IGA!

35. Michigan

I admit to being a bit of a homer for this flag, even as objectively awful as it is. Being a Michigan native, I grew up seeing this flag everywhere. Like the Pennsylvania flag, it stands out a bit from the rest of the Bedsheet Bunch with the use of animals flanking the inner shield. 

The elk and the moose look like they’re rearing up to check out the eagle, and the white double banner raised in a curve looks like a toothy smile from a distance. It’s a completely goofy design, with too many things to look at — and there is way too much text on it. Three different Latin phrases, to be exact.

There’s no movement in Michigan to change the state flag, but I did find a design proposal someone had made online to make the flag look like this:

The two stars represent Michigan’s two peninsulas, and the five stripes represent the five Great Lakes, four of which touch Michigan. I think it’s a brilliant design, even though nothing will probably ever come of it.

34. New Hampshire

The one thing this state-seal flag has going for it is that I would be able to tell from a distance that there’s a boat on it. It’s not crowded with a bunch of extraneous images. I would also know that the boat image is probably connected with the harbor at Portsmouth, which it indeed is. It’s still not a great flag, but it’s better than a lot of its bedsheet peers.

33. Kentucky

It’s another state seal, but at least it’s not so busy. It’s simple and to the point: A pioneer and a statesman shake hands amid the motto “United we stand, divided we fall.” Not great, but not awful.

32. Connecticut

The design element here is pretty distinct, which is a positive. The shield puts me in the mind of the old U.S. highway signs, and the grapevines offer a rare splash of purple, a color you’ll almost never see on a flag. 

See what I mean?

The only odd thing is that from a distance, the alignment of the grapevines sort of looks like a face — two eyes and a kind of meh-shaped mouth. Zoom out and you’ll see it. You don’t want “meh” on your flag. Easy fix, though: Use one grapevine instead of three, and make it bigger. 

Because why not?

31. Massachusetts

Points for originality and comparative simplicity, but I’m not sure it tells me much about the state. The shield depicts an Indian, arrow pointed down in an apparent gesture of peace or surrender, as he stands next to a single star. Above his head, a disembodied arm wielding a sword appears out of nowhere, seemingly ready to strike — but strike whom, exactly? The hapless Indian? What did he do, other than lose his land?

Maybe it’s because the image is on a white background, but it seems as if there’s a lot of wasted space on this flag. I’m not a fan.

30. South Dakota

I don’t hate this flag, in spite of some really ugly design choices, including a monochrome state seal whose details are nearly impossible to make out unless you’re right on top of it. It also prominently features the state nickname — something better left for license plates than flags, really — and, like Idaho, it names the state twice. 

But there’s a decent flag lurking in here, under the design mistakes. In particular, there’s something appealing about the sunburst that rings the seal, and the lighter shade of blue helps it stand in contrast to a lot of bedsheets on this list.

Maybe it’s the fact that it reminds me of the flag of Palau, one of my favorite country flags. I’m not sure.

Of course, it would make far more sense for South Dakota to simply start over and design a flag based on the faces on Mount Rushmore. If that’s what everyone knows you for, then run with it.

29. Missouri

It’s basically the Dutch tricolor with the Missouri state seal in the center. There’s way too much crammed into the seal to be able to see any of the details from even a reasonable distance. Take all of that out and leave the outer ring of stars, and you’d actually have a nice-looking and fairly distinct flag.

Something like this, perhaps.

28. Hawaii

Vexillologists seem to be enamored of this flag. I don’t see the appeal. If a flag is meant to symbolically convey the spirit of the thing it represents, then how does a flag that looks either like a test pattern or Ernie’s shirt from Sesame Street communicate anything whatsoever about an island paradise?

You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

First off, there’s absolutely no reason to have the Union Jack in the canton, as Hawaii was never part of the British empire. It’s only there because King Kamehameha held pro-British sentiments during his reign. And notice, too, that the colors of the Ernie-shirt stripes don’t even line up with the corresponding colors of the Union Jack. 

It’s all a big, disjointed mess.

The eight stripes are said to represent the eight main islands in the Hawaiian archipelago. At a bare minimum, the flag would be improved by removing the canton and just using the stripes. It would still be an unappealing flag, but at least it would be less unappealing than it is now. But it’s so easy to imagine something far better — some kind of attractive visual symbol that would evoke sunshine or ocean waves, for instance. The flag of Kiribati provides a good example of what could be done here. Hawaii could take its eight stripes and turn them into ocean waves!

27. Nevada

The silver star represents the Silver State, and the garland is made of sagebrush, the state flower. The arched banner above the star reads “Battle Born,” signifying Nevada’s entry into the union during the height of the Civil War. Despite the lettering, it’s a great, rugged, Western design. I only wonder why it’s stuck up in the canton, leaving the rest of the flag completely blank. If it were enlarged and centered to make it more prominent, the flag would rank much higher on this list.

26. Washington

It’s kind of sad that a flag wins points just for not being blue. But part of the appeal of the flag of the Evergreen State is indeed that it’s, well, green.

Still, let’s be honest: The state could do a lot better than just putting George Washington’s face on there. Not only does the combination of his face and the color scheme make the flag vaguely resemble a dollar bill, but our first president never even set foot in the state.

My love of the Cascadia flag stems in large part from its connection to the Northwest and its striking symbolic imagery that captures the natural beauty of this part of the country. Washington, which is part of Cascadia, is a beautiful state. I lived there for nine years. Why not try to capture that beauty in its flag, rather than just putting a dead president on there and calling it a day?

Bradley Lockhart, a resident of the city of Bellingham, is trying to do just that. He designed an attractive flag for his city that’s become quite popular there, and now he’s taken his creativity one step further in proposing a new state flag that, like the Cascadia flag, incorporates blue, green, and white for the sky, waterways, grass, trees, and snow-capped mountains. But instead of placing a Douglas fir front and center as the Cascadia flag does, Lockhart used stylized images of mountain peaks that flatten out as the design moves from left to right, emblematic of the flatlands that characterize Washington’s terrain once you cross the Cascade Range. It’s a simple yet brilliant design. I can only hope someone in Olympia is paying attention.

Looks good to me!

25. North Dakota

Even though the design on this flag is nearly identical to the Great Seal of the United States, and therefore says next to nothing about North Dakota itself, it has a somewhat appealing look that evokes the Americana of the time period it was designed in — 1911, to be exact. To its credit, North Dakota at least tried something different and used something other than its own state seal, as so many states have done.

24. Louisiana

This is quite an interesting flag. Pelicans have been associated with Louisiana from the time it was a territory. On the flag you’ll see three drops of blood on the pelican feeding her young, symbolic of a legend that says a mother pelican will draw blood from herself to give to her offspring in the absence of other food. The legend is said to suggest both sacrifice for the greater good and the bloodshed of Christ for humanity. (Bear in mind that Louisiana is a heavily Catholic place.)

It's also said that the pelican is posed on the flag to mimic the shape of the fleur-de-lis. So this flag is overall very Louisiana-centric. That’s nice to see.

23. Oregon

Yes, this flag, with its abundance of lettering and numbering and its inclusion of a monochrome state seal, breaks a lot of rules for good flag design. But I like it in spite of its shortcomings. There’s something about the old-time, rustic feel of the typeface that’s appealing, along with the graceful arching of the “STATE OF OREGON” lettering.

But the other thing I like about it is that the flag has a different design on the reverse — the only U.S. state flag to do so. On the back, there’s just a little old beaver, hanging out and minding its own business.

If Oregon’s flag were just the beaver in its bucktoothed simplicity, it would be one of the best state flags in the United States.

But even this would be a pleasant compromise:

22. Florida

This is basically Alabama’s flag with Florida’s state seal in the center. It seems that the flag originally consisted of just the seal on a white sheet. Then Floridians approved the addition of the St. Andrew’s Cross, possibly in a nod to the Cross of Burgundy that would have flown over Florida when it was under Spanish rule.

The Burgundy Cross.

 As flag designs go, there are many worse ones out there, but the seal needs to go. A change to the design in 1985 actually made the seal look busier and more cluttered than it was before — in short, it was not an improvement. 

The pre-1985 state flag, with a less cluttered seal.

Of course, if you take away the seal, it’s just Alabama’s flag.

All things considered, I think Florida needs to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. Surely Floridians can look around their scenic state and come up with something that symbolizes its uniqueness and beauty. Heck, strike a deal with Disney and put some mouse ears on there.

21. Arkansas

It’s an OK flag. The prominent diamond shape symbolizes Arkansas’ status as America’s largest source of diamonds.

Other than that, it’s hard to ignore that there are a heck of a lot of stars on this flag. The 25 white stars in the blue border signify Arkansas’ status as the 25th state to join the union, and the four larger stars in the white field represent the four nations that have ruled over the state: France, Spain, the United States, and the Confederacy. Not sure you really want to draw attention to the whole Confederacy thing, but I suppose from a historical point of view, it is what it is.

In any event, dropping the name from the flag would improve it immensely.

20. North Carolina

The simplicity of the single red, white, and blue bars makes this design attractive. But it loses points for all the wordiness on the hoist side. Two dates and a big “N” and “C” — none of that really needs to be there. Of course, if you take those away, it’s just the Texas flag with the red and white flipped around. Overall, not a bad flag at all.

19. Oklahoma

I really like the American Indian imagery here. The olive branch crossing the peace pipe symbolizes the union of the native and European people. It is, of course, a bit of a convenient lie to suggest that the Indians wanted the union with the white invaders in the first place, and we all know that the natives got the short end of the stick. But putting politics aside and speaking just from a design point of view, it’s nicely done. Taking off the name of the state — which would just mean reverting to the flag as it looked up till 1941 — would improve it tremendously.

The old, wordless flag. Much better.

18. California

In many ways, this is a good flag design. It’s simple and uncluttered, it has specific and identifiable imagery, and it can be seen clearly from a distance. What’s peculiar about it is that the design is taken from a flag created during a 19th-century revolt against Mexican rule that lasted all of three weeks. In other words, it represents a blip in California’s history.

Also, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think of bears when I think of California. I think of the Gold Rush, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Death Valley, and Spike, Snoopy’s mustachioed brother, talking to cactuses down in Needles. Putting a giant redwood on a golden background, for example, would say far more about California than a bear does.

Of course, the red star and the word “Republic” conjure up uncomfortable images of all the authoritarian “people’s republics” that have long been a menace to human liberty. Given the way California’s going, maybe some of the symbolism on its flag is just a little bit too appropriate.

17. Georgia

Georgia’s state flags, to put it mildly, have been problematic for a long time. In 1956, state legislators succeeded in getting the Confederate battle flag placed on the design when it had never been there before, in a clear nod to their desire for continued racial segregation following the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Under increasing pressure, the state finally changed the flag in 2001, but it was a design disaster, with a mustard-yellow version of the state seal on a blue background, and a banner underneath it displaying five historical flags — including the controversial one the new flag had just replaced.

Yeah, that's just ugly.

Finally, Georgia came up with something a little more visually appealing in 2003. Its current flag has a mostly clean design, with one white stripe sandwiched between two red ones, and a blue canton featuring the state seal inside a ring of 13 stars. The seal doesn’t need to be there; it’s an indecipherable blob from a distance. Take that away, and you have a really nice-looking flag design.

The only problem is, if you take away the seal, you’re left with this…

…which is the national flag of the Confederate States of America.

That’s right. Georgia finally got rid of the Confederate battle flag, only to replace it with the Confederate national flag.

Politics aside, it’s a nice design. But it seems Georgia just can’t let go of its past.

16. Colorado

This one is usually a favorite of flag enthusiasts. It’s not bad, but I’m not a fan of the big “C,” and even less of a fan of the yellow ball (representing Colorado’s abundant sunshine) stuffed inside the negative space of the “C.” Maybe it says something about when I came of age, but all I can see when I look at this is Pac-Man swallowing a dot.

Waka-waka-waka!

For some reason, it also throws off vibes of a corporate logo from a bygone time. I could see that big “C” with blue and white pinstripes on a baseball jersey from the ’70s, for example.

I think it would at least look a little cleaner if the yellow ball disappeared.

Like this.

 15. Indiana

A torch of liberty and a circle of 19 stars, representing Indiana’s order of induction into the union. Simple, if not altogether striking. 

Growing up just north of the Indiana state line, I’m quite familiar with this flag, and I always thought it could use a little more contrast. The gold and the dark blue tend to blend together a bit. Either a lighter yellow or a lighter blue would help accentuate the design immensely, I think.

14. Iowa

Like North Dakota’s flag, the eagle design gives a nod to federal imagery more than it does to the state itself — yet I can’t help liking the fundamental turn-of-the-20th-century American-ness of it. The ribbon dangling from the eagle’s beak has a heck of a lot of words on it, but purely on an aesthetic level, it’s a striking design. It looks so nice that it almost doesn’t matter that you couldn’t make out the text from a distance. I also like the typeface chosen for the word “Iowa.” In short, it’s an attractive flag despite all the words on it.

The vertical tricolor also gives it a fresh uniqueness among American state flags. It’s basically the French flag, only with the white bar larger than the blue and red ones. That may or may not be a nod to Iowa’s past as part of the Louisiana Territory. Regardless, it’s a well-executed design.

13. Rhode Island

The clean simplicity of the design makes this a very attractive flag. The anchor tells us that Rhode Island is a coastal state, but it appears to have a deeper meaning as well. Combined with the word “Hope,” it’s said to refer to a passage in the Bible’s Letter to the Hebrews, which states, “Hope we have as an anchor of the soul.”

The only downside of the design is that the gold against white makes the whole thing look a little washed out.

12. South Carolina

This attractive design has its origins in the American Revolution. The crescent moon was taken from an insignia on the caps of South Carolina’s soldiers. It became known as the Moultrie flag, in honor of its creator, Col. William Moultree, who fought in a victorious defense of Sullivan’s Island against the British. The palmetto tree was added in 1861, also in a nod to the defense of the island, whose palmettos acted as a protective buffer against British cannon fire.

The flag did become a symbol of the Confederate cause for a while. But without any inflammatory imagery, that association faded over time, and today it’s rightfully seen as a simple and effective flag design for the state it represents.

11. Wyoming

Why does the state seal need to be there? It looks either like someone tried to postmark the bison or the USDA stamped it Grade A. Take that away, and you have a terrific flag that, in a single image, communicates the spirit of the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. Even with the regrettable seal, though, it’s still a great flag.

10. Alabama

As with Florida’s flag, the red St. Andrew’s Cross is probably symbolic of past Spanish rule, when the Cross of Burgundy would have flown over at least southern Alabama. Some have suggested that the design is a veiled nod to the Confederate Stars-and-Bars, though there doesn’t appear to be any solid evidence backing that claim.

9. Utah

I’m cheating a little bit here, as Utah’s brand-new state flag doesn’t come into official use until March 2024. But since it’s only a matter of time until it replaces the old flag, and considering it’s such a massive upgrade, I thought it was only fair to include it.

The old flag was yet another blue bedsheet, emblazoned with the state seal. It’s heavy with federal imagery, though with a shield in the center that reads “Industry” and features a beehive — long a symbol associated with team-minded hard work and progress in Utah. (It also has a strong association with the Mormons.)

The official Utah flag... for now.

That distinctive beehive survived, and rightly so, into the design of the new flag. Even more appropriately, the hive now sits on a hexagon, the shape of the cells in a honeycomb. The red at the bottom of the new flag is said to represent the state’s red canyon rock and, more cryptically, “perseverance.” (Sweating blood, maybe?) The blue skies and white mountain peaks are self-explanatory. It’s a really nice-looking design. Distinct, but not too busy. I’ve read a few complaints that the whole thing looks more like a corporate logo than it does a flag, and I guess I can appreciate that point of view. If Utah had an NHL team, I could easily imagine this design on the jerseys. I still like it, though.

Anyway, if people across the nation end up liking what Utah did with its flag, moving away from the bland sameness of all those seals on bedsheets, maybe it will encourage more states to give their flags a fresh look.

8. Mississippi

Remember how we talked about Georgia, and its seeming inability to break from the Confederate imagery of its past? Mississippi had the same problem, but it finally managed to do better.

From 1894 to 2020, Mississippi’s flag sported the Confederate battle flag in the canton. That design became problematic enough over time that the state legislature was finally able to rally sufficient support to begin work on a new flag. The result is what we have today — a fresh and attractive design, with a white magnolia, the state flower, front and center. The gold stripes act as a tasteful barrier between the red and blue vertical panels, and the ring of stars adds a nice accent to the flower. Even the text is kept to a minimum — you might not even notice the subtle “In God We Trust” at the bottom of the ring unless you were looking for it.

You did well, Mississippi. You did well.

7. Alaska

You’ve probably heard the story of how a young boy, an orphaned Alaska Native, designed the flag that would become not just the symbol of his state but also one of the most beloved and iconic of all American state flags.

The Big Dipper is part of the larger constellation Ursa Major, symbolic of the bears native to Alaska. And the Big Dipper is a visual aid for locating Polaris, the North Star — itself symbolic of America’s northernmost state.

Alaska couldn’t have asked for a better flag to capture its identity.

6. Arizona

Such a bright and vibrant design! The red and yellow stripes that double as sunbeams are a nod to Arizona’s Spanish influence; the Spanish flag is red and yellow. The copper color of the star symbolizes the state’s copper production. And the blue has been described both as symbolizing liberty and the waters of the Colorado River. The star and the rays also manage to communicate the relentless desert heat that’s so strongly associated with Arizona. 

I do think the copper clashes a little bit with the red and yellow, but that’s a minor quibble, and it doesn’t take away from the fact that this flag is a tremendous success in the way it communicates so much about a place using so few elements.

5. Ohio

Ohio’s flag is more like a pennant. Its unique shape alone makes it stand out from the crowd, and in a good way. Its red, white, and blue color scheme, complete with stars and stripes, makes it look like a stylized version of the American flag without simply being an uninspired copy of it. The 17 stars represent the order of Ohio’s induction into the union, and the circle they surround is meant both to represent the buckeye, a symbol of Ohio and its people, and a letter “O.” You wouldn’t even realize it’s supposed to be a letter because of the way it naturally blends into the design. Unlike the “C” on the Colorado flag that’s a bit on the nose and draws attention to itself, Ohio’s “O” is tastefully subtle.

Ohio’s flag always makes me think of all the patriotic bunting you see at baseball games and around the Fourth of July. It’s festive, attractive, one of a kind, and distinctly American.

4. Maryland

Maryland’s flag breaks all the rules of what constitutes a good flag design. But I suppose that just proves that rules are meant to be broken. This flag is so unusual, so internally clashing, so disorientingly garish, that it somehow actually manages to circle around from bad to good. It’s one of those things you just can’t look away from. There’s nothing else remotely like it, and it seems most Marylanders love it.

Half of the flag looks like a melting checkerboard, and the other half looks like a heraldic cross (which is actually what it is) that wouldn’t look out of place in a Renaissance festival. But these aren’t just random images. They come from the shield in the state’s coat of arms, and they in turn symbolize the reunion of the people of the state who had split over the Civil War. The checkerboard pattern, depicting Lord Baltimore’s coat of arms, became the symbol of pro-Union Marylanders; while the crosses, representing the Crossland family of Lord Baltimore’s mother, were adopted as a Confederate symbol.

Maryland’s flag is the exact opposite, in a very good way, of the boring sea of state seals on blue bedsheets that make up so many U.S. state flags. It’s aggressively weird and undeniably iconic, and that’s exactly what I love about it.

3. Tennessee

Tennessee’s flag demonstrates that simple is good. The three stars signify the three main regions of the state, and the blue circle that embraces them symbolizes their unity. The blue bar at the end of the red field is there for a practical reason: to delineate the end of the flag as it’s flying, which is precisely something that a good flag designer would think to do.

This is how you make a great flag.

2. Texas

Do you know anyone who doesn’t like this flag? I don’t. Once the symbol of a sovereign nation, the Lone Star Flag persists as a bold symbol of Texan independence, ingenuity, unity, and pride. It’s iconic and quintessentially American. Clean, direct, assertive, patriotic, and straightforward. It's fantastic in every way.

1. New Mexico

Almost everyone picks New Mexico as having the best of the 50 American state flags, and for good reason. It checks every box for what makes a successful flag design. It’s simple yet meaningful. Its colors, like those of the Arizona flag, evoke both the state’s Spanish heritage and its earthy, rocky, sun-baked landscapes. Even the simple design at the center of the flag itself, the sun symbol of the Zia Indians, adds to the warm Southwestern theme. Just looking at this flag, you can imagine the desert heat with the sun blazing overhead.

If there’s anything at all regrettable about this flag, it’s that the sun symbol, sacred to the Zia people, was used without their permission. One can only hope that the power and simple beauty of the design will prompt admirers to remember the many trials and sacrifices of the Zia, as well as of all the indigenous people of the Americas, and to reflect on how the sacred sun symbol points us toward an appreciation of the cycles of life and our connection to the natural world.

Magnificent flag, New Mexico.

Let your freak flag fly     

And that’s it! Thanks for reading, and I welcome your comments.