I didn’t expect to be writing about boobs two posts in a row, but here we are.
Recently, I was at the garden store with my son picking up a few things to support my years-long obsession with my yard. We were getting a few plants, some oakleaf hydrangeas (they do well in Virginia and our soil), some seeds, and a birdhouse, and finally I unexpectedly picked up a small little garden style Virginia state flag. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it.
If you haven’t seen it, this is what it looks like:
I love our state flag. It's the only American state flag with nudity, let alone a boob hanging out and its owner in the middle of what appears to be violently taking someone down. Little did I know that buying this flag, popping it in my yard at this exact time was coincidentally “doing discourse.”
If you haven’t heard, because really why would you have unless you for some reason keep up with annoyingly niche virginia political news, there is recent discourse around our flag. As I understand it, some republican legislator posed with our flag, but it wasn’t our current flag it was a different, confederate era version where the boob is covered up. The Virginia side of twitter (or X, whatever) lit up and the commentary became an avalanche, so much so that even I heard about this which is saying something since let’s just say my field of vision these days is incredibly narrow. I might be missing some details here and honestly, I don’t want to look it up because really I just want an excuse to talk about our flag, the state (or I guess, commonwealth) and some other funny little things about it here.
Virginia is basically my adopted home state, one of my kids was born here, my husband was born here, and in total, I’ve lived here the longest over any other place. When you’re a military brat, you don’t really stay somewhere long enough for it to be home but this is probably closest to it for me. We moved back during Covid when we were stuck in a city with baby twins and no family around and then it felt like we blinked and all of the sudden last year isn’t 2019, it's now like FIVE YEARS AGO??
Not to sound like a tourist board, but Virginia is a good place to raise a family. It's outdoorsy, great national and state parks, access to the appalachian mountains, proximity to the beach, good public schools, and it's the center of any major American historical moment - colonial, founding fathers, civil war, and even before then. Other states I’ve lived in don’t have so much of that feel, or at least by american standards old, they are cities built in the 60’s or later, nothing but new homes, gridded suburbs, and people that moved from other places.
Also, it's a commonwealth. Do I know what that means? No, but I like correcting people when they say state and I feel like being annoying.
Another thing that's fun to correct is when people say Appalachia - Appalayshia - not the correct way: Appuh- Lach-Uh.
Another hallmark Virginia thing to do is to make sure we always say that Nova (Northern Virginia and the area that’s basically DC), is not actually Virginia, not really anyway.
But back to our flag. I love the flag. Not because I’m some state patriotic person, which I guess judging by the previous paragraphs, maybe I kinda am? Really as I stated, it's because of how odd it is - the boob, the violence. According to my extensive research on wikipedia, the female figure personifies the Roman virtue of virtus and represents the new Commonwealth, her pose indicates a battle already won. Tyranny lies on the ground at the foot of Virtus, symbolizing Great Britain’s defeat by Virginia. The motto is Sic semper tyrannis, or in English, Thus always to tyrants, which is derived from famous events in Roman history and attributed to Brutus in his participation in the killing of Caesar.
That anti tyranny zeal is carried on into another funny Virginia oddity, our weird thing with vanity license plates. Essentially you can get whatever vanity plate that you want to. So you have the range of normal-ish ones like “in god we trust” or “proud veteran” to the very obscure and odd. The most common one you’ll see where I live is “Don’t Tread on Me” which is very Virginia. We have “Choose Life” ones for being anti abortion, and vague wildflowers and Skyline Drive ones too. You see the most Choose lLIfe ones in Northern Virginia, which maybe is a bit unexpected given the political makeup but perhaps people get it as a way of staking their place against the tide. But my absolute favorite of all time is the horse enthusiast one, below.
You don’t see these very often, but when I do I get so excited. The little child girl that was fascinated by horses loves it that someone has brought this interest into adulthood but also so much that you need to get a license plate commemorating it. I think explaining your love of horses as “enthusiast” is very funny. I imagine they (whatever group made this plate) were brainstorming the perfect place idea:
“What about Horse Lover”
“Oh no, we can’t put that, that definitely sounds…. Not great. How about… Horse Enthusiast?”
A better and more thoughtful person could tell you that our license plate culture “says something” maybe. I think it's probably just that if you let people customize license plates, they are going to get weird with it. Also that we, Americans, really care about our cars and expressing ourselves. They must “say something” about us. But when you live in a giant ass country and you can only get most places by car, I suppose this is bound to happen.
Maybe it says something about how silly politics is, the reason there are so many here in the first place is that there was a law/rule in which if you make one political/issue based plate, you have to also provide basically the opposite view. So because there is Choose Life, we need the option for Supporting Choice. So we can wage our what feels like endless tribal political war to the streets, everything is political, even the car you drive, the license plate you get. You must make every inch of your being into a political message.
And to be fair, I got an AFLCIO Union labor plate, so I guess I’m not immune to this need, I inhabit it myself.
Anyway, by the time I got my new state flag, proudly displayed it in my yard the discourse was well on its way to being *a story* with a few new stories peppered in. I kinda wonder if any of my neighbors thought I put it out there intentionally because I’m trying to “say something,” little do they know I just got it because I like the design, boob and motto.
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Still not a horse enthusiast but slightly more enthused about Virginia (we generally don't hear much about it in Europe). I learned so much! Except what a commonwealth is, which I was actually dying to find out. But also too lazy to Google it.