I'm assuming you have not been following the flag drama that is going on right now down in the Caribbean. But I have...so let me fill you in. So we're talking about the tiny Caribbean island of Martinique, which has never had a flag of its own. (We can talk about the snake flag at another time). It's part of France because of, you guessed it, colonialism. But last year, in 2022, they decided, “We need our own flag, we need our own anthem, we need our own identity.” Which is great!
So they started a public vote, and that is where the drama began and it hasn't stopped. First of all, just a completely low turnout. A lot of people were like, “This doesn't matter. I don't care.” But some people cared enough because then there was a cyberattack that completely halted the online vote. But after all of that, they finally came to a winner. 72%, which is quite a large margin of the people that voted voted for this.
A red, green and black flag with a hummingbird on it. It's...fine. It's fine! It's fine. But this is not even close to the best part or the end of this drama.
Part 2
A lot of people started immediately criticizing this, saying, first of all, “A hummingbird? That doesn't represent Martinique.” But then they figured out, “where did this hummingbird come from? ”Oh, yeah. It comes directly from Shutterstock.
So we're talking after this flag's been announced as the official new flag. Everybody's, like, celebrating, saying “Congratulations, Martinique!” They're like, “Crap. What the hell do we do?”
So after a ton of controversy, and actually some cyberbullying towards the designer (which is not cool), the designer pulls the design. The government's like, “No, we can't use that,” so they go down to the second most popular design, which is this. So this flag has been used by independence movements within Martinique.
So it's been seen for a little bit longer, it has a little bit more history and will probably become the new flag of Martinique, but we won't know until February 3rd when the government finally votes to adopt. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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