A week ago, I found myself sitting in the lobby of a Times Square hotel, watching the currents of a Tuesday night intersect. As I sit down to write this for Flag Day on Sunday, that scene — the pride, the basketball fans, the market hum — still feels like the most honest map of the country we are actually living in.

The lobby was a cross-section of the current American temperament. To my left, a launch party for the Pride Committee was in full swing, Whitney Houston and Cher blasting over the sound system. A few yards away, a phalanx of San Antonio Spurs fans — Victor Wembanyama jerseys everywhere — wore the silver and black with the kind of tribal intensity only championship basketball can summon. The next day I would walk down the street to the Nasdaq, where the CNBC circuit hummed with the symbols of our global financial machinery, the ticker crawling its green and red numbers across the screen.

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They were all occupying the same floor, breathing the same air, existing under the same wide, messy tent. What struck me most was not the differences, but the ease. At the bar, Spurs fans were laughing with Pride attendees — many of them wearing Knicks colors—engaging with their “enemy” as if they had arrived together. A television flickered above them with market news no one seemed particularly interested in. Tourists drifted through the lobby pulling luggage. Different accents crossed in the air. Nobody appeared to be asking for permission to belong. They were simply occupying the same space, bringing their own stories with them.

Earlier, the parade’s grand marshal had spoken, and somewhere between the music and the celebration came a harder note. The Stonewall National Monument — the birthplace of all of this, the first national monument dedicated to the gay rights movement — had been quietly edited. The Park Service had cut “LGBTQ+” down to “LGB,” removing the transgender and queer Americans who helped launch the uprising from the official telling. Erased, the grand marshal said, from their own monument.

With Flag Day almost here, I find myself thinking about the thing itself — the actual cloth, and what we have lately decided it means. About who gets stitched in, and who gets quietly removed.

A strain of contemporary politics has grown comfortable wielding the flag as a weapon of exclusion. These voices treat the Stars and Stripes as a property deed — a symbol to be claimed for a narrow vision, while branding everyone outside that vision as outsiders.

They have it backward.

The flag is not a static monolith.

It is an amalgamation.

The red and white stripes began as a colonial protest, a defiant statement from 13 distinct colonies that had to learn, through fire and friction, how to become one thing. The blue field and the stars are the messy record of that process — a design that has never truly been finished.

Even the flag we recognize today, with its 50 stars, began as a high-school history project. In 1958, a 17-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, named Robert Heft restitched his parents’ 48-star flag into a 50-star design, anticipating Alaska and Hawaii. As Heft told it, his teacher gave it a B-minus. Two years later it became the official flag of the United States, and the grade was changed to an A. Heft’s design was not even unique. Several others independently arrived at the same pattern.

That is the point!

The flag was, quite literally, in the air — an amateur’s guess at what the country was becoming, one of many hands reaching toward the same unfinished design.

The Betsy Ross narrative, whether myth or history, carries the same spirit: a collaborative act of stitching disparate pieces into something larger than any one of them.

Those who insist on a rigid, narrow patriotism fear the intersection of identities — the Pride rainbow, the basketball jersey, the exchange floor — because they fear the very thing that created the flag in the first place: the exhausting, frustrating, necessary work of stitching different people into one tapestry.

Watching the scene unfold, I found myself thinking about Minneapolis. About the Somali coffee shops along Lake Street. The Hmong markets in St. Paul. Church basements. Neighborhood festivals. Union halls. Public libraries. Baseball fields.

Pride flags hanging from front porches in Longfellow. Different histories. Different assumptions. Different loyalties. Yet every day they occupy the same civic space.

We argue endlessly about who belongs in America, but most American cities already contain the answer. I have moved through 65 years of this country’s life, and I have watched the boundaries of what we consider acceptable shift beneath my feet. We have had to grow into versions of ourselves that would have seemed impossible — or even forbidden — only a few decades ago.

The people celebrating Pride, the basketball fans, and the traders on the exchange floor are not threats to our patriotism. They are evidence of it.

Remember who carried the flag, and what they carried it for. The people who fought and bled and never came home were not dying for a narrow country. They were dying for the possibility that the red, white and blue could someday create enough room for all of us to live and work and breathe in the same place — a country large enough to contain disagreement without demanding exile.

And in that lobby, for one ordinary Tuesday night, the idea seemed almost real. All colors. Every sexuality. A half-dozen languages crossing in the air. The cultures, the rival jerseys, the music — the whole improbable, overlapping crowd of us gathered beneath a single roof.

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The American experiment has never once been perfect. But standing in the middle of it, I was reminded that it remains, even now, a beautiful thing. That is what the flag is for. Real patriotism is not a cudgel used to exclude. It does not get to quietly cut letters from an acronym, or names from a monument, and call what remains the whole story.

The flag was never meant to certify perfection.

It was meant to mark the ongoing experiment.

The unfinished work of living together in the open.

Charles J. DiVencenzo Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and essayist whose commentaries have recently appeared in the Star Tribune.

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