Some make conscious decision to avoid flag

CHICAGO -- They gathered at a mosque on Chicago's northwest side -- Jews, Muslims and Christians together -- to pray and sing for peace. Some carried handwritten signs of unity, including one that read "Shalom, Salaam, Peace."

But one symbol was nowhere to be found: the American flag. While much of the nation has been all but blanketed in the stars and stripes since the Sept. 11 attacks, some Americans have made the conscious, and sometimes unpopular, decision not to fly the flag.

"This was not just an assault on Americans -- but an assault on the whole world," says Amanda Klonsky, a community organizer with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. The group is helping organize ongoing "prayer circles" in and outside Chicago area mosques.

Rachel Simon, a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., says students from several colleges in the state gathered recently to create a "global peace flag" as a show of support for victims of the terrorist attack without being "a nationalistic Americans-only kind of thing."

Klonsky's group is also concerned that flags may become a symbol for an overzealous patriotic fervor that could exclude some Americans, including those who are or are thought to be Middle Eastern.

Instead of flags, Klonsky's group is distributing window signs that read, "We Support Our Arab American and Muslim Neighbors."

She and others may not find comfort in the flag, or the patriotic songs sung at religious services nationwide. But many Americans do, says Dan McAdams, a professor of human development and psychology at Northwestern University.

"There seems to be a call to regain that special, unique status -- as God's special nation, the chosen and blessed," says McAdams, who also directs the university's Foley Center for the Study of Lives.

Even Lee Weiner, one of the so-called Chicago Seven who made a name for themselves protesting the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic convention, says it took him and his wife "about 20 seconds" to decide to hang a flag from their garage in a suburb of New York.

"The explosions of the twin towers -- the horror -- struck at my core," says Weiner, now 62 and a fund-raiser for the Anti-Defamation League in New York. "I won back the right to my almost hidden patriotic allegiance."

David Dellinger, another of the surviving Chicago Seven, says he doesn't mind his comrade's softened view toward the flag.

"I've always had unity with people whose views don't match up exactly with mine," said Dellinger, now 86 and living in Montpelier, Vt. But he has no plans to raise one. Such an act, he says, would "encourage the calls for a war that would kill more innocent people."

Simon says she understands the need for unity. But the 24-year-old says she has shown her support in other ways, by calling the Red Cross to volunteer and by housing people who've been unable to get back into their homes in New York.

The Rev. Lawton Higgs Sr., a United Methodist pastor from Birmingham, Ala., decided to attend one of the mosque prayer circles while on a visit to his congregation's sister church in Chicago.

He said he knew he'd "come to the right place" to express his feelings about the attacks when he arrived to see the sign outside the church: "God Bless ... The World."