Familiar Anzac Day a blessing
Today, on Anzac Day, one cannot help but wonder what the tone of the country might have been, if a different national flag was being readied for parades and dawn services.
Would Returned Services Associations have recognised and included the Kyle Lockwood design?
Would the sight of it have meant as much to the crowds gathered at memorials? Would it have meant anything?
Would the flag’s politics have dominated the national conversation today rather than the service and sacrifice of our countrymen and women?
The resulting emotion from these considerations is sweet relief; that the focus of our modern day Anzac commemorations will be intact, undiminished by a second-wind of referendum rhetoric and division.
There is a unity to Anzac Day, a simplicity to our shared intentions, that makes it our country’s most sacred occasion.
We don’t debate what it means to be a New Zealander, we don’t quantify or justify a sense of nationalism.
We get up early, gather together, mourn, remember and, for most of us, count our blessings that war has never afflicted our daily life.
We would also do well to remember that the Anzacs at Gallipoli forged a bond between New Zealand and Australia that transcends sheep jokes and sporting rivalry. It may even make it appropriate and a matter of pride that our national flags are so similar.
The raising of a new design, particularly one so caked in political muck and contention over the cost and process of the flag referendum, would have been an unwelcome return to the days when April 25 was just a soapbox for protest and propaganda, circa the Vietnam War.
It was once as damaged an occasion as Waitangi Day.
It took a generation to refresh the meaning of Anzac Day.
And for those who have children, its significance resonates even deeper, when children start confronting parents with questions about what happened to their great-granddad and why we wear paper poppies in April.
"What happened to the New Zealand flag?" is a question I’m pleased I won’t have to answer.