Sometimes it’s like other people know something I don’t. Like maybe I didn’t get the password or learn the secret handshake.
Every few days I pass a neighbor’s house where a few months ago four large flags appeared. It may have been about July 4, so I wasn’t surprised to see the American flag. A second flag was the Christian flag and the third was the flag of Israel, and these did not surprise me either. But the fourth flag was a mystery.
Every time I passed the flags I tried to decipher the words and the emblem on the unknown flag but invariably the wind whipped across the Prairie furling the mystery flag. The flag was white with a simple green symbol and three or four words across the top. Then one day I saw it blown straight out as if in a headwind. The symbol was a tree, not unlike a Christmas tree, and the words said, “Appeal to Heaven.”
Sources state those words were coined by Englishman John Locke in his “Second Treatise of Government,” a document on the ideas of a workable democracy, ideas he gleaned from New World travelers and their accounts of governing structures found within American Indian groups, particularly Iroquois.
Locke was referred to as the Father of “classical liberalism and limited republican [as in republic] government.” Ideas were beginning to hum on “natural law,” certain “unalienable rights” like life, liberty and property, and suggestions that when all resources and justices on earth have been exhausted an “appeal to heaven” remains. Which may or may not lead to civil disobedience by following a “higher” law.
The tree on the flag is a white pine, also called the “liberty pine” and the “tree of peace.” The white pine was an old growth tree native to the colonies, being 6 feet in diameter and up to 230 feet in height. The King of England wanted the trees for sailing ships and began to systematically take or strip the trees from the colonies under the “Broad Arrow Act.”
Thus, by 1775, a rumble had begun in the colonies which led to the advent of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that has now resurged. Reportedly, the flag was flown by George Washington, and in 1776 Massachusetts adopted the flag for its official navy which would soon become the United States Navy. The rumbles would ultimately result in the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War.
Fast forward to today where those who bear the flag claim it is a symbol of “the American spirit for independence, with rights that cannot be relinquished or taken away.” A coalition was formed for “solidarity, conviction, and encouragement to press for liberty,” when government is thought to overstep its bounds.
On July 24, 2015, an Appeal to Heaven legislative caucus consisting of government officials from 18 states organized to promote their cause. Those states included Georgia, Arkansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Ohio, Utah and South Carolina.
And so, the mystery of the furling flag was solved. More information can be found at appealtoheaven.org.
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