Driving through Raleigh today I noticed something unusual. About half the flags I saw were flying at half-mast.<\/p>\n
There was no consistency to it. A whole stretch of businesses might have their flying at the top of the pole, while other businesses might have just the national flag at half-mast with the state and local flags flying above it.<\/p>\n
What was causing this, I wondered?<\/p>\n
I called my mom. She had noticed the exact same thing.<\/p>\n
“I bet it’s because of the Pope,” she said.<\/p>\n
That made sense. Except, “But the President would have to announce something. He hasn’t.”<\/p>\n
“Maybe people are assuming that he did,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The thing is,” I said, “there’s no reason why the Pope’s death means we fly our flags at half-mast. Sure, he was the leader of a religion one billion strong, but we wouldn’t fly our flags at half-mast if Vladimir Putin or Tony Blair dropped dead of massive heart attacks next week.”<\/p>\n
“People are strange,” she replied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Driving through Raleigh today I noticed something unusual. About half the flags I saw were flying at half-mast. There was no consistency to it. A whole stretch of businesses might have their flying at the top of the pole, while other businesses might have just the national flag at half-mast with the state and localContinue reading “On Flying Flags”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[946,273],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-flags","tag-george-bush","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}