Some things are just a matter of state pride.

Saturday, February 23, 2002

Some things are just a matter of state pride.

We would take it pretty hard, for instance, if Minnesota was known as the state with the worst colleges. Wouldn’t we be embarassed if Minnesota had the highest crime rate in the nation? Or imagine how we’d feel if our pro football team was a joke? Oh, wait … forget that last one.

But you get my point. State pride is important. So how is it that we can stand having what is widely known as one of the ugliest state flags in the nation?

A few months ago, people who are into this sort of thing did a study and determined that Minnesota’s was one of the very worst state flags.

Its design – the state seal plopped down in the middle of a blue field (Woo! Creative!) – is pretty bland, I’ll admit. It’s not the kind of thing you really recognize at first sight; there is no imagery, like the stars and stripes, that makes it simple and memorable.

It surely has meaning. The flag features a farmer planting, an Indian on a horse, a musket, a sunset, a waterfall and a wreath of flowers. That pretty much covers it for Minnesota; I guess if you wanted to add some more visual representations of our state, you could throw in a hunk of lutefisk, a snowball or Randy Moss taking a play off, but who’s going to nitpick?

As if it wasn’t complicated enough, it also features three dates and 19 stars. Why 19? We weren’t the 19th state. Well, it’s because we were the 19th state after the 13 original colonies. I guess 32 stars would have been too much to ask.

What we end up with is similar to other states. Many other flag makers also chose to stick their state seal on a flag and go home from work early that day. Ours is somehow worse, though; looking through a photo gallery of the different flags, ours is just somehow the most nondistinctive. If you weren’t from here and saw the thing from five feet or more away, you would have no clue what it was.

Well, some people want to change all this. They have the idea for a simpler, more striking flag that we could fly over all our state offices and whatnot. State Sen. Ed Oliver (R-Deephaven) has been working on this for years, and last week he, along with pals of his from Winona, Rochester and Hawley, unveiled some alternatives. Those designs break away from the traditional complex design in favor of simple arrangements of blue and green. The one pictured here apparently uses green to represent all our greenery and blue for either sky or lakes (we have a lot of both) and one star, maybe because we’re the North Star state. Except in hockey, of course.

I remember as a kid learning to draw the American flag; it’s something I think everybody does. Last summer, we at the Tribune managed to build two giant American flags out of newspaper for our Fourth of July float. These kinds of things are made possible because the old Stars and Stripes is simple; yet the flag is a powerful symbol because despite its simplicity, it has deep meaning. I couldn’t imagine trying to cut up old newspapers to paste together into a farmer, an Indian, a musket, a waterfall, a sunset, and so forth.

Maybe a new state flag isn’t the most pressing issue on the table, but if we’re thinking about state pride, it’s something that deserves a look.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan.belden@albertleatribune.com