Flags – national flags especially – are cultural symbols and symbols evoke emotion: emotions learned, acquired, and shared.
To change a nation’s flag is thus to engage as much in emotion as engage in reason or rational argument, and emotion generates heat in ways reason doesn’t.
Recent news of delaying the new flag a couple of months is therefore interesting and understandable given more pressing issues.
Friends back from the Hong Kong and Singapore 7s told me they were bombarded with requests for their flags and greeted everywhere with thumbs-up signs when people realised they were Fijians.
Indeed Fijian 7s arguably has done more for the flag and national recognition than anyone or anything else.
And will soon do so before an audience of millions in Rio.
Imagine then if Fiji wins a medal, perhaps gold.
Imagine the collective emotion. Imagine national pride. Where then a new flag? Who then will worry about a Union Jack in one corner? For it is surely the entirety that matters, not the detail.
Factor in too this is the year of The Queen’s 90th birthday: icon of rectitude and political stability and living link to the free-world’s fight for freedom, 1939-1945.
I have argued before why rationally speaking a new flag to me makes sense.
The other side, however, is emotion.
True, we can grow to love new symbols, but they must come from the people and even then the learning takes time.
Take note of what’s happened in New Zealand.
