CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Gadsden Flag, an icon of the American Revolutionary War that sports the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me,” will now feature the additional text “But It Is Fine to Tread on My Neighbors if You Want,” confirmed sources.
“This is long overdue,” said Bubba Gadsden, chair of the Gadsden Family Estate, as he whittled on his front porch. “When my great great grampy Christopher Gadsden wrote ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ he thought it would be obvious what he meant was literally don’t tread on him specifically. If government agents need to tread on anybody else, they can do so, no problem. Otherwise he would have said ‘Don’t tread on us,’ right? Flags need to be semantically precise or else they could be taken the wrong way.”
The change has been widely embraced by fans of the flag.
“I have a Gadsden Flag on my truck, on my hat, and on three of my most stained shirts,” said Turner Jeffries of Sheffield, Alabama, while angrily hitting Facebook laugh reacts on mainstream news articles. “I don’t mind updating all of those flags. This way, I get to be a brave resistance fighter against tyranny, while also supporting the government as it invades my town. That’s a win for everybody. Besides, I’m not a neighbor. My neighbors are the neighbors. There shouldn’t be any confusion.”
Even among fans of the change, there have been some unexpected downstream effects.
“It’s nice to be booked up,” said Terry Bubson, owner of Antebellum Ink, a tattoo parlor in Tampa. “But updating all these tattoos is a nightmare. Everybody in town wants me to add the new text to the bottom of their Gadsden tattoos, not realizing that to do that, I’ll have to write right over their swastikas.”
When reached for comment on the change, a representative for ICE asked if the snake on the flag is a citizen.
