Today is Flag Day in the United States. I’m not going to spend much time here on bunting and parades — I am truly happy to celebrate this holiday, but I find I have a lot more respect for what the flag actually means when I treat it less like a celebration and more like a contract with a renewal clause.
Last week I argued that freedom is the result of a daily refusal to decide for someone else what they’re allowed to be. Today’s claim is the companion: even after you win it, freedom decays unless someone keeps refusing.
Freedoms that are won are weirdly fragile. People assume that once a right is enshrined or a constitution ratified or a struggle won, the work is done.
It’s not done. It’s never done.
There’s no rest for the weary here. Every generation has to choose again, in real conditions the previous generation could not have predicted, whether to keep refusing to impose on others. Because when the guardians of a freedom stop guarding it, freedom decays and becomes a target for others to overrun.
They stop for a lot of reasons. Sometimes a new threat looks like it justifies an exception. Sometimes the principle just starts to feel tired. And sometimes the people who would benefit from rolling things back are simply quicker than the guardians, who don’t notice anything has changed until it’s gone, or assume that everyone else feels as strongly about the freedom as they do.
In the books I’m writing, the Garden is the in-world version of this story. Valkyries in this world have extraordinary martial gifts that make them fighters without peer. Although the gifts are valued in Granblue society, the power structure was also afraid of what the Valkyries could do if they were not properly supervised and monitored. But the optics of a country outright enslaving a group of their citizens was also not desirable. So, instead, they were relegated to an ornate fortress. Which, over time, became a cage. The people who originally guarded it became the people who enforce it. The petals are confined for their own good now, by people they are sworn to protect.
That’s how every freedom that is won dies if no one keeps guarding it. The cause becomes a position, the position becomes an institution, and eventually the institution itself becomes the warden of the thing it was meant to defend.
The flag is a promise the country has made to itself. Today is a good day to remember that promises require people to keep them. The next generation will only have the freedoms the current generation is willing to refight for.