Maricopan responds to desecration with flag-waving music challenge (w/video)

A college campus protest of police brutality in Georgia led to people trampling the American flag. That led to a social media challenge for people to video themselves doing likewise in what has been called the “Eric Sheppard Challenge” for a leader of that protest.

Maricopa resident Russ Marsh was horrified to see the challenge go viral, with people stomping and dancing on the flag and 7 million tuning in.

“When I see people, Americans, desecrating the flag, my thoughts go to the blood, sweat and tears of my friends and to family members that lost loved ones protecting the flag,” he said.

A former Utah Entertainer of the Year, Russ Marsh is a singer-songwriter who has long been associated with patriotic tunes. He and his wife Cathy thought the best reaction to the protest – instead of the violence that has been threatened against Sheppard – was through words and song.

He issued a “Russ Marsh Challenge” on YouTube calling for people to share their love for the American flag. They are encouraging Americans to share videos of themselves explaining what the flag means to them or singing a patriotic song like one from the Marsh catalogue. In his video he sings one of his standards, “Don’t Tread on Old Glory” and includes the lyrics.

That song was the first song read into the Congressional Record in 1989. Written by Marsh, his sister Jacque Mounteer and friend Larry Seely, it had come to the attention of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who included its lyrics in his Senate-floor response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that defined flag-burning as free expression.

Cathy Marsh, a native of Malaysia, calls the American flag “something sacred, a symbol of what America is all about.”

She said many in the younger generation see the flag only as a piece of cloth and a piece of property and have not been educated about its meaning. Desecration is particularly shocking to her because in Malaysia anyone who mistreated a Malaysian flag would be thrown in jail “with no representation.”

Marsh said he is all for free speech, and his musical response to flag abuse is his own expression of that.