Don't lower flags for those who divide us
Anaplasmosis cases are increasing
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I noticed Saturday while Bella and I were downtown with Ringo the city’s flags were at half-staff.
Flying the flag at half-staff is done to mourn and memorialize specific government officials, such as a president or vice president, or to mark a specific day, such as Memorial Day (morning only) and Patriot Day on Sept. 11, according to the U.S. Flag Code.
Flags nationwide have also been lowered to half-staff on rare occasions after the death of a civilian considered so extraordinary their loss was felt by citizens of all persuasions.
Presidents ordered flags lowered to half-staff after the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Hope and Eleanor Roosevelt, for example.
Charlie Kirk does not belong in that company.
Kirk was a political partisan and Republican Party recruiter who relied on rhetoric that was often cruel and divisive. He picked on people who weren’t straight and white.
He said, “One in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” — a lie.
He called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful.”
He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake.”
He attacked trans people, calling them an “abomination.”
Some people considered him charismatic and he persuaded some college-age kids to vote Republican.
Kirk was murdered Wednesday in a public assassination. His death does not change who he was in life or qualify him for posthumous honors.
I had heard Kirk’s name but wasn’t sure until this week what he did. Numerous other Americans are first learning about him now.
Trump ordered flags flown at half-staff from Sept. 10 until sundown today, Sept. 14, to honor Kirk. “Orders” like this are not legally binding.
The Glens Falls flags were halfway down on Saturday, however, so it appears the city obeyed. (To clarify: I heard from Mayor Bill Collins on Sunday after the column was published that the city customarily keeps its flags lowered for four days to commemorate Sept. 11 and they were not lowered to honor Kirk.)
All are appalled by Kirk’s murder, but many will not miss him. Flags nationwide should have stayed at the top of their poles.
Beware ticks
Growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and then Saranac Lake, I never saw ticks or worried about them.
I saw ticks only when we went to Cape Cod. They were gross, but I wasn’t afraid of them. I and my siblings and cousins spent time discussing the best way to kill them.
Now they’re everywhere, from Florida to Maine, and they’re killing us.
In Warren County, tick-borne infections have shot up in the last six years — anaplasmosis from 38 in 2020 to 100 this year (as of Aug. 27), Lyme from 18 to 330, babesiosis from 3 to 23. (Figures from Warren County Public Health.)
Lyme, left untreated, can cause debilitating symptoms over a period of years.
Anaplasmosis can put you in the hospital within a week. It starts with mild flulike symptoms but leads to fever, headaches and nausea, then, possibly, respiratory and renal failure, internal bleeding and brain inflammation.
Treatment with doxycycline is effective, but you have to figure out what you’ve got first, and since the ticks can be as small as a grain of pepper, victims don’t realize they’ve been bitten.
“So far in 2025, we’ve seen an increasing number of patients come to urgent care related to tick bites,” said Doctor Jeremy DiBari, the lead provider at Hudson Headwaters urgent care centers in Glens Falls and Warrensburg.
After a nice dinner out with her husband, Bill, on Friday, Aug. 15, Salem’s supervisor, Evera Sue Clary, spent the next several days in bed.
“It was like I was in a cocoon, I had no sense of time or space. Bill finally said to me, ‘Either you get up and go to the doctor’s or I’m calling the ambulance.’
“I have learned since then, three people close to me have ended up in the hospital. This was serious. I didn’t think of it as being serious.”
She thinks she got infected while gardening.
“The difficulty is they’re so darn small some of them,” she said.
Almost a month later, she still tires easily. Mushroom coffee helps, she said.
Ticks weren’t an issue in the Adirondacks a few decades ago, but now, like open water in the lakes in February, they’re everywhere.
Poem
Here is a poem from Hudson Falls poet Richard Carella:
Surfacing
In the unpeopled places where I like to go,
to get away from the world and to half-forget woe,
there isn’t anyone -if I should go under-
to pull me back to the surface: lost, then, forever...
unless, sometime later–
as dead men will do who have drowned in an
ocean or river, I should float (absently) up to it.
Update, Sunday 9 a.m.: Mayor Collins just got back to me and said the flags being at half-staff were not for Charlie Kirk but to honor 9/11 heroes. The 9/11 observance is officially from sunrise to sunset on that day, known as Patriot Day, and Trump ordered the observance for Kirk to run through Sunday (today), which is why I thought, seeing the local flags lowered on Saturday, it was for Kirk. But these federal flag-lowering directives are guidance, or suggestions, without the force of law, and local communities can go their own way. So I'm glad we're not engaging in the immediate rewriting of Charlie Kirk's legacy, as so much of the country is. Pres. Trump, for example, says he intends to award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. Who's next, Alex Jones?
"I had heard Kirk’s name but wasn’t sure until this week what he did. Numerous other Americans are first learning about him now."
I too have heard his name, but never read anything he wrote, listened to anything he ever said, or read about him on right-wing news sites. As such, I was unaware of the following he seemed to have had. So the reaction of many people to his death came as a bit of a surprise to me. And it also apparently surprised many others.
I raise this because I think it’s indicative of the polarization and fragmentation of our country. Typically, when the country goes into mourning for the loss of a well-known person, it’s something of a shared loss. We feel it, to one degree or another, and instinctively understand the loss others may feel.
I think it’s significant that this loss of life, this abhorrent and senseless death, affects different parts of America in profoundly different ways. Some take it personally; some more abstractly; for some, it has little meaning.
Perhaps this is a mirror image, to some degree, of the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, or the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband.
Not a good indication of where our country is right now, or where we’re headed.