Слава Україні! Both the exclamation point and the half-decipherable Cyryllic script give this phrase an air of lightness and excitement that even tragic contexts do not raze. Like the lively and seemingly apolitical Ukrainian flag, whose joy-hued stripes have already inspired me to share my bewilderment at the news of people fleeing a war just east of my country.
I might never have had the idea of making tiny Ukrainian flags had it not been for the charity drive at my son’s school, for which—he informed me, late one March afternoon—he volunteered to bring a lemon tart the next morning. So bake we did, and what a team effort it was. At last, I had my child in full prep-cook mode, which is perhaps why my mind got to get loose enough to wander off and ponder the marketing.
Flags! It was what brainstorm sessions at creative agencies hope to comprise—a jolt of refreshing novelty, unexpected substance, effortless clarity. You’ll have these little flags you poke into each square, and the blue and yellow will look incredible against the lemon-yellow, and you’ll tie it all in with the bake sale, and, and, and… Minutes later, Anker had the crust dough neatly pressed into the baking tray and I had a prototype. A toothpick clipped to half its size, the blue a piece of masking tape, the yellow a strip cut from one of the early-naughts consumer protest stickers my friend Mindy had issued me with on a visit to my Brooklyn apartment.
Let’s pause on these stickers for a second. Opposing the unethical animal testing by a major American pet food brand, these substantial notices never actually compelled me to emblazon anything with their caution-tape-themed whistle-blowing. I think I recall Mindy being similarly confused, since on the backs of the stickers the small print requested that activists not stick them on the unscrupulous company’s products. Where, then? In a drawer they went. Over the years—two decades, nearly—I would occasionally cut out and repurpose the high-contrast WARNING taking up the top third, but it wasn’t until now, when I suddenly really needed yellow tape in this exact shade, that the true value of this bizarre souvenir finally revealed itself. The fact that this value was political, too—more viscerally political, even, than the original animal rights activism—is extraordinary. And you know what else is extraordinary? The quality of the materials, because the adhesive hasn’t degraded a day.
During the bake sale, Anker forgot about the flags, but the tart sold anyway, and everybody loved it, along with all the other things Anker’s classmates invoked their guardians to help with so urgently. But afterwards the flags circulated among classmates, leaving a few that made it back home. So now I put one up on our front door and gave another to our neighbors and another to a delivery guy, which is when it became clear to me that these tiny tokens of rah-rah affection don’t need to stick out of pastry to have meaning and utility.
I know people who’ve made room in their homes for strangers exiled from theirs. I know people who’ve driven to the border crossings. I know people who volunteer at the train stations or in front of the Ukrainian embassy. I know people who’ve made a hundred sandwiches and struggled to know what comes next. How do you pick the crowd you can’t feed anyway? What do you do once you’re part of this crowd, carrying bags of food?
I have not made these famous sandwiches that are uniting nations. But over the weeks since Anker’s bake sale I have spent hours making hundreds of diminutive flags. And the yellow strips don’t seem to be ending—my stack of stickers from Mindy is finite, but each produces enough yellow for 26 tiny flags.
I offer them to strangers in the street, clerks in stores, friends who come over. I’ll leave one with the tip after paying a bill at a restaurant. (One guy I met once turned out to have one already: he made it his bookmark after I had eaten at his place of work.) Sometimes I hand them out to people after the yoga and meditation classes I attend. I toss them into envelopes with the letters I send.
Usually, tiny flags elicit big smiles. Maybe someone who’s been making political sandwiches winds up feeling hopeful. Or a refugee kid in a Warsaw street feels a micron closer to home. A spark of something decidedly joy-hued travels from one heart to another. And a nation lives on, displaced but more important than ever.
People volunteer what they are able to give.
