There are eighteen flagpoles along the main street in a small town outside Detroit.
Hamtramck, it's called.
For ten years, citizens could request to have their flag flown on them, and almost everyone got a yes. The Polish, the Yemeni, the Bangladeshi, the rainbow flag in June.
That was the kind of town it was.
The town that was one of the first in America to allow the call to prayer to sound from the mosques in the morning, because *it was the right thing to do*, and because *it felt right* to be the ones who did it.
In 2021, the town elected a city council where all members were Muslims, and a mayor who had campaigned on the promise that the rainbow flag didn't belong on the municipality's flagpoles.
In 2023, the city council voted unanimously for what he had promised.
It wasn't a ban on the flag. It was a ban on all flags on municipal property that weren't the country's, the state's, or the town's.
*Neutrality*, they called it.
No special treatment of any group. And a few weeks ago, a federal appeals court ruled they had the right to uphold the ban.
Then came the sentence that the whole story is really about. A former council member, a retired social worker, herself a lesbian, stood up in the council chamber and said -
"We welcomed you. We set up organisations that got you food, clothes and housing. We did everything to make your arrival easier. And this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?"
Stop.
You need to read that sentence slowly.
Because the mechanism lies within it - whole and intact.
The lesbian woman believed she had entered into an agreement. That what she gave was a payment, and that there would quite naturally be something returned of the same kind.
But no one had asked the Muslim newcomers. No one had asked them to say out loud what they thought about that flag, about that way of living, about who decides over a shared space. No one had asked, because the very question would have been to set a condition, and conditions were the one thing a modern progressive open town was proud not to have.
This is the mistake that repeats itself in the Western world these decades.
People believe that tolerance is an empty space that everyone can move into.
It's not.
Tolerance is a product. It has grown up in one particular place, from one particular history, where faith slowly became something you carried inside you, and not something the state enforced. That assumption is so self-evident to us, in the Western world, that we can no longer see it. And because we can't see it, we think it belongs to everyone. That anyone who walks in the door here takes it with them and on them, just because he walked through it.
They don't.
And then there's the matter of democracy.
People imagined it protected values. It doesn't do that either. Democracy counts. That's its whole strength, and that's its whole silence. The day the majority changes, the shared space changes with it, without anyone having broken a single rule. No coup. No violence.
Just a vote, no votes against, and a flag that comes down.
What you need to notice is that the Muslim city council didn't even need its own words. They used ours.
Neutrality.
Equal treatment.
No favouritism.
Respect for citizens' religious rights.
It was our language that took the flag down. Our tool, placed in hands with a different purpose.
And the federal court said - it's legal.
Of course it was legal.
We built it ourselves.
And here you have to be honest, even where it hurts.
Because the city council didn't do anything wrong in the sense the word is normally used. They said what they would do, they were elected on it, and they did it.
You can't blame a conviction for being convinced. And you can't blame a majority for counting.
The only thing in that story that doesn't bear daylight is the assumption among those who opened the door: - that *the good* they did would come back as the same good. And that hospitality turns into a shared worldview, just as long as you do enough of it.
This is what I've previously called *toxic compassion*, and what the Canadian evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad has given an even sharper name - suicidal empathy.
Not ill will. The opposite.
A *goodness* that is so occupied with being good that it has stopped asking what it leads to. It gets its reward in the moment, in being the ones who welcomed, and pushes the bill out to a future it won't live in itself.
Hamtramck is small. Thirty thousand people. But the mechanism isn't small. It's the same in Malmö, in Brussels, in Birmingham, in parts of Copenhagen and so on.
Everywhere where people assumed that openness was something everyone wanted, and not something some could use. No one has voted on it. No one has fought a war over it. It happens within the rules, one city council, one school, one neighbourhood at a time.
You can call it ingratitude. It's not. You can call it betrayal. It's not that either. Because betrayal requires an agreement, and there was no agreement.
There was an expectation that was never said out loud, because the one who had said it out loud - who had made a demand - would immediately have become *the evil one* - the racist, the xenophobe, the intolerant. So people stayed silent. And called the silence *openness*.
So now many places are learning the lesson the hard way.
What you don't dare set as a condition, you don't get to keep either.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a lovely week, friends. ☀
