Part 1: Whose Hero?

UNEDITED

What the Hometown Heroes campaign asks a city to decide

Today I wade into a thorny thicket. There is a clearing on the other side. With any luck I’ll get there without being scratched beyond recognition.

Council Member At-Large Robert McLymore has proposed that the City of Newburgh adopt the Hometown Heroes Banner Program — personalized banners honoring service members, displayed on poles throughout the city. He has stated his intent to move forward with it, and has described it as “not a statement about war or military conflict.”

The program began in grief. In 2007, Ruth Stonesifer — a Gold Star mother whose son, Army Ranger Kristofor Stonesifer, was killed in a helicopter crash in Pakistan in October 2001, in one of the first operations of the war in Afghanistan — set out to hang a banner in Harrisburg for every Pennsylvanian lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 140 of the state’s 183 Gold Star families took part. The first banners rose at the state capitol in May 2007, one of them bearing her son’s face. It is hard to imagine a more honest impulse.¹

A few months after his death, Stonesifer wrote of her son: “He wouldn’t understand all the fuss being made over him. He would be amused and bewildered that so much attention was being made about his life and death. He would not define his death as a sacrifice for his country.”²

The mother who founded the program, writing of the first man it honored, said he would not have called his own death what the banners were calling it. Some forty-three of those families did not take part. We are not told why.

What began as one mother’s grief did not stay one mother’s grief. It became a product.

The original banners were made by a commercial outdoor-decorations company — a firm whose ordinary trade is seasonal and holiday displays — and the program is now sold to municipalities as a turnkey package by that vendor and others like it. That company has gone further: it has trademarked the name “Hometown Heroes Banner Program”, created criteria to determine who counts as eligible, and shifted the cost onto the families of those depicted. A private firm therefore holds the branding as the program spreads from town to town, each new municipality routing profits back to the same company, buying the same civic feeling. Its sales materials promise to coach a town “through every step of the process,” from recruiting donors to “creating excitement in your community” with flyers and social media to “providing ad layouts for your local newspaper.”

That is the distance the thing has traveled: from a Gold Star mother securing a single pole for her fallen son, to a decorating company that owns the trademark on the tribute.* It is why the program arrives the same in one town as the next — the same vinyl, the same brackets, the same application. The grief was authentic. The merchandising is not. The question is not whether the feeling is sincere, of course it is; it is whether a city should let a vendor’s template decide how it speaks, on its own poles, in the name of all its residents, for whose benefit.³

Sincerity is not incidental to the program — it is the program’s fuel. The wish to see a son, a father, a neighbor recognized is real. The program takes that real wish and puts it to work: people’s service, their grief, their pride, conscripted into a civic gesture that performs reverence on a pole at little cost to the city. One thing is masquerades as another. The people are not the masquerade. They are the ones it relies on.

Start with the defect itself. When this government places expressive content on public property, it is bound by the First Amendment to remain neutral as between viewpoints. This program cannot meet that obligation.

The Councilman puts it this way: “These banners are not symbols of war; they are symbols of service, sacrifice, duty, and community pride.” But symbols of whose service, chosen by whom? That question gets stepped over. When the subject is who deserves the public’s honor, the choice of subject is not neutral. It is an endorsement. “Honor” is not a topic like roads or parks. To decide whose service the State will publicly bless is to take a side.

Take the third of his words: duty. Duty to what? To the Constitution — in which case the citizen who refused an unjust war out of conscience has done her duty too. Yet the program excludes her? Or duty to whatever order is given. In that case, the City is honoring obedience itself, and has taken the most contestable position of all. Service, sacrifice, duty, pride are not neutral virtues the banners simply observe here. They are values the City would be choosing to celebrate in some lives and to withhold from others.

And there is a fact that sharpens the injury. There is a principle, old in our law, that the State should not force its message on those who cannot escape it — the concern the courts have called the problem of the captive audience. The City will say it does not apply here: a banner is glimpsed and passed, and no driver is captive. But consider where these banners go. A war memorial sits in one place — a green, a square — and you choose whether to enter the space it occupies. You can route around it. It does not follow you. A banner program of this kind is different in kind, not degree: it is not a destination you visit but an installation along the arteries of ordinary life — the road to work, to the school, to the store. You do not go to it. It is placed in the path you cannot avoid. And it does not appear once. It multiplies, block after block, renewed year after year, until there is no route through the city that escapes the State naming whom to honor. This does not, by itself, make the program unlawful; the government may speak in its own public spaces. But it deepens the intrusion. Whatever the program turns out to be — endorsement or open forum — every resident is made to pass beneath it daily, with no power to decline. The principle was built for the trapped rider and the targeted home; a tribute bolted along every corridor a resident must travel is its natural extension.

But let’s return to the main defect — the quandry of neutral selection. It leaves the Council three options.

Exercise true neutrality, and take all comers. If the City takes no position on whose service is worthy, it must honor anyone who served the country as they understood it. Begin with those it would find … unappealing. The ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, who bore arms and died in the field. The relative serving today in a foreign military, under the claim that that nation’s war serves American interests. And, at a moment when participants in the January 6th attack on the Capitol are being pardoned and recast as patriots, the family that comes forward to honor one of them as a man who served his country as he saw it. True neutrality admits everyone, including those this city would find odious.

The trap closes from the other side too, and that side makes it worse for the program, because it is not about the odious — it is about the honorable the program would still refuse. If the City honors service to the country, then it must reckon with those whose service was as real as any soldier’s and who would never appear on its poles. The enslaved, whose forced labor built much of the nation’s early wealth — a foundation without which there is no country to defend. The merchant mariners of the Second World War, who died at the highest casualty rate of any service, 1 in 26, and whom the government itself refused to recognize as veterans until a federal court ordered it, four decades late.⁴ The conscientious objector who would not bear arms but served under fire as a medic, risking his life for the same country by the lights of a different conscience. The point: the line the program draws is not “worthy” against “unworthy.” It was military service against every other kind of devotion this country has ever been built or saved by. To call that neutral is the evasion at the heart of the whole enterprise.
Narrow the program to enlisted service members and veterans. Written tightly enough — honorable discharge from the United States Armed Forces, name and branch and years only — the program is arguably lawful. But it is lawful only as the City’s own speech, and the moment the City defends it that way it has abandoned the claim that it “takes no position.” It will have declared, on the record, that service in the United States military is the one form of devotion to this country it will honor — and that the principles and actions of those who served differently, who refused to serve, or who oppose militarism outright, do not count.

That is a position. It is an endorsement. It wears the costume of neutrality only until someone asks.
Do not run the program at all. This is the course that resolves the dilemma rather than disguising it: the City elects not to speak at all, because it must speak for all. And it compels no resident to pass beneath the State’s chosen tribute on the way to work. It is the cleanest path, and it is the one available to this Council: restraint.

There is one small dodge that should be addressed.

The City could say the poles belong to Central Hudson, and that it therefore places no speech of its own.

Whether the pole belongs to the City or to Central Hudson, the constitutional question is the same: who curates the message. If this Council adopts this program and decides whose service Newburgh will honor, then the City is the speaker, and it cannot escape that by pointing out that the pole belongs to the utility. A government does not shed its constitutional obligations by routing its conduct through a private entity. I litigated exactly that principle to the Supreme Court of the United States: Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 1995, and prevailed. The doctrine that case established, which governs when a nominally private actor is in fact bound by the First Amendment, bears my name.

You do not get to call the program neutral while you so visibly select. You must choose among these options, on the record.

The City Council does not dishonor anyone’s military service by viewing this program with a degree of skepticism. I grieve that service. I drove five hours each way for a 25-minute ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in April to see my uncle finally laid to rest for his WWII service. It was private — immediate family and a few close friends, and no one else.

But I do not genuflect before that service — and my uncle, who rendered it, told me to be skeptical of those who think I should. The City should not compel every resident to genuflect before it either. The government may honor its service people in any number of ways, and does: at Arlington; at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; at the Soldiers and Sailors monument in Cooperstown, the Otsego county seat; at the war memorial here in Newburgh, in the triangle at Leroy, Park and Grand Avenue.

Like Kristofor Stonesifer, whose mother said would have been bewildered by the attention, my uncle never wanted to talk about the war. It was something he did, and he neither expected nor wanted public display made of it. In this he was not unusual. Almost everyone I have known who actually fought — who was in it — has been the same: uneasy with the word hero, unwilling to perform the memory, suspicious of ceremony. It is the oldest pattern in the record of war: the ones who saw the most tend to say the least. I have read that, for some, the silence is not modesty. Some of what they saw — what one man’s willingness to kill another looks like, stripped to its essence — made them question the enterprise itself.

There are exceptions, and they are real — some who came home to silence or contempt have every reason to want, at last, to be seen. But this program presumes a hunger for spectacle that the people it claims to honor have, again and again, told us they do not necessarily share.

Someone will point to the Vietnam veterans — the ones in patch-covered leather, the Nam Knights and clubs like them, who wear their service on their backs wherever they go — and say there is plainly a generation that wants to be seen. True enough. But look closely at what they are doing.

It is a uniform of sorts. But it is one each man assembled himself, and it carries his particulars: his branch, his unit, his dead, the road name stitched where another man’s says something else. He in many cases rejects the very government he feels deceived him, and wears what he wears in defiance. The patch is his, the brotherhood is his, the dead he honors are his. He is not waiting for a city to decide his face is worthy and hang it on a pole for the town’s quality of life.

The banner does the reverse. It takes every kind of service, every different war, every distinct life, and runs them through one template — the same vinyl, the same frame, the same word over every face. It homogenizes them. Look at the banners already hanging in the towns nearby — Washingtonville, New Windsor, or one that is a couple hours away, in Cooperstown. The faces have been given a treatment, an antique wash, a vintage fade, the same applied to a man lost in Afghanistan as to one lost in 1944. Their service is not shown so much as styled — aestheticized into a single warm haze, the particular war and the particular death smoothed away into something easier to look at. The vest insists on the man. The banner dissolves him into a mood.

The question was never whether veterans want to be remembered. It is who holds the pen — the man who fashions his own emblem, or the city that selects which faces to mount over its streets, and flattens them all to fit.

So it is fair to ask the question no one promoting this has asked aloud: who is it for? The ones being honored, or the ones who, for reasons of their own, wish to honor? The Councilman has, without quite meaning to, answered it.

Describing the program to Hank Gross of the Mid-Hudson News on May 28, 2026, he said the banners would “bring more of this quality of life which will lead to a special character in the City of Newburgh.”⁵ The stated purpose is the city’s quality of life, the city’s special character — the feel of the place to those who live in it and pass through it. That is not the veteran’s need. It is the town’s ambiance. If many of the honored would quietly decline the banner, then the banner is not, at bottom, for them. It is for the honorer: for the human, and genuine, need to express reverence, gratitude, grief, pride, and for a city’s wish to feel a certain way about itself. But a city should be honest about whose need it is serving, because once that question is answered honestly, what the program actually does comes into view.

And beneath the town’s ambiance there is a deeper need still. What the banner answers, in the end, is the need to believe the service was not in vain — that the death meant something, that the loss was not waste. That need belongs to the living. It is the living’s need, not the dead’s, and the two are not the same. Recall what Stonesifer wrote of her own son: that he would not have defined his death as a sacrifice for his country. The program defines it that way regardless, because the people who remain need it defined that way. So the banner does not honor the soldier’s understanding of his own service. It supplies the meaning the rest of us require in order to bear the loss, and prints it over his face. That may be a mercy for the living. It is not the same as honoring the dead.

It lets a town display its virtue at no cost, a visible reverence that asks little of it but a vote and some vinyl. It takes a political act — the State choosing whom to honor, on the public’s poles, in the path of every resident — and dresses it as a natural feeling, obvious and apolitical, the kind of thing only a churl would question. To take a contestable public choice and present it as a self-evident sentiment is precisely the function of propaganda. And propaganda is never more effective than this: not when a liar imposes it on a credulous public, but when sincere people perform it upon themselves and call it honor. There is no cynic here to expose, no manipulator to catch. The sincerity is not the alibi. It is the mechanism.

And there is something else. A manufactured virtue, performed on the cheap and installed over the public way, at the very moment the veterans it invokes are sleeping in cars and dying by their own hand at seventeen a day. The image of the honored one, raised up in the public square so the crowd below may feel clean — that is not a tribute. It is closer to an offering: the veteran’s face laid on the altar of the town’s good opinion of itself, the debt owed to the living paid in the coin of the dead. No one means it as such. That is what makes it work.

These programs run in towns large and small, and in cities more diverse than Newburgh; they are administered, almost everywhere, by some arm of the municipality. What they have not been is tested. No court has squarely decided whether a program that selects whom a city will honor can call itself viewpoint-neutral, because in most places no one with standing has forced the question to judgment. The absence of a lawsuit is not a finding of neutrality. It is only the silence of a question not yet put.

Where these programs operate at scale, look at how they resolve the very problem of selection: not by achieving neutrality, but by writing the choice into the rules. The cities that run large versions narrow eligibility to honorable service in the United States Armed Forces — a discharge document, a branch, a rank. That is presented as a neutral subject limit, the way a forum might be limited to a topic. It is not. When the “subject” is whose service is worthy, the limit is not neutral scope; it is a value, declared. To restrict the honor to military service is to announce that this form of devotion to country — and not the conscientious objector’s, not the war resister’s, not the civilian life given to others — is the one the city esteems. That is the endorsement of militarism, made explicit in the eligibility criteria. Whether it is also unlawful viewpoint discrimination is the question no court has settled, and I will take up in the next installment why I believe it cannot survive the test. But the city need not lose in court for the point to hold.

The programs are not untested because they are sound. They are untested because the right case has not yet been brought. What has reached a courtroom is telling in its own way: in Union City, Pennsylvania, a man sued over a banner hung so low it damaged his vehicle, and won — a quarrel about clearance, not about speech. The constitutional question was not put. But strains are visible. In Hartford, Vermont, the program honored a veteran later convicted of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from an elderly widow; a neighboring official wondered aloud how a town could screen for character without judging it. A local editorial board there noted the obvious difficulty: once a town opens its poles to honor, the law may not let it pick and choose as freely as it would like. These are not yet lawsuits over speech. They are the sound of a question working its way toward one.⁸

There is one more thing these programs tend to have in common, and it cuts to who gets honored at all. As the Mid-Hudson News reporting describes them, the banners are usually paid for by the family, service organization, or friends who sponsor them — a fee, often a hundred to two hundred dollars. Many programs offer a hardship sponsorship for those who cannot pay, which is itself the admission that the cost is a barrier. The Councilman has not said how a Newburgh program would be funded. But if it followed the usual model, the honor would flow by the ability to pay: pooled among the veterans whose families have the means, and absent for the ones who do not. And the veterans who can least afford a banner are, very often, the same ones who can least afford a home — the homeless and the rent-burdened, the people most in need of something real. A tribute paid for by sponsors does not distribute honor by service; it distributes it by means.

A banner is not a small good standing beside an unmet need. It is what fills the space the need would otherwise occupy. Reverence performed relieves the pressure that might have forced the costly thing: the town has been seen to honor its veterans, the feeling of obligation is discharged, and the obligation itself goes quietly unmet. No one need intend this for it to happen; the gesture does the work on its own. Honor performed becomes obligation deferred. This is the part that should trouble anyone of good faith. The banner does not sit harmlessly beside the unmet need. It makes that need less likely to be seen, and therefore less likely to be met — because it spends the very impulse that might have met it. A town that had done nothing would still feel the debt unpaid. A town that has hung the banner feels it settled. The gesture does not add to the effort to help. It substitutes for it, and by substituting, forecloses it.

There is a way to know whether that is what is happening here. Look at whether the obligation is met. Then look at what meeting it would cost — and what it would not.

On a single night in January 2024, nearly 33,000 veterans were homeless. Almost half a million more are severely rent-burdened, paying more than half of what they earn to keep a roof. Young veterans are twice as likely as other adults to lose their housing; women who served, two to three times as likely.⁶

These are the people the banners would never depict — the ones with no family to sponsor them, no one to apply on their behalf.

And there is a harder fact the banners do not touch. Begin where Stonesifer began — Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars cost roughly 7,000 American lives in combat. In the years since they began, this country has lost more than 120,000 veterans to suicide. Widen the lens to take in Vietnam as well, and the combat dead of all three wars together. Over 65,000, still far fewer, barely over half, than the Americans we have lost, by their own hand, after coming home.⁷

Housing them is the costly lift. Mental health services. Job training. A piece of vinyl on a utility pole is the cheap feel-good gesture that asks nothing of a city but a vote. And I will tell you what I know one serviceman would have made of it. My uncle, whose burial at Arlington I bore witness to in April, came so close at nineteen to not surviving the war he is now honored for. Knowing him as I did — we were both artists — he would not merely have been embarrassed by a banner. He would have been insulted by one, and he would have fought to keep his name off a pole.

I cannot claim to know why with certainty beyond my conversations with him; I have been in war zones, but I have never fought in one. But I suspect it is this. War is the largest thing a state does, and yet combat is lived as a relentless sequence of individual decisions, each one – in spite of your brothers-in-arms – yours alone, each carrying consequences out of all proportion to the instant in which it is made. The man who survives that has known the war not as an act that a sovereign nation makes on a global stage, but as his own existential, personal experience. Particular, unshareable, his. A banner takes that and turns it back into the State’s symbol. It abstracts away the very thing the experience was made of. That, I think, is the insult. The honor he earned is not something you bolt to a pole. It is something you create with the living.

So, the servicemen and women this program would honor might very well ask their elected leaders this question: why banners over our roadways instead of roofs over our heads? Why words of honor instead of acts of healing?

There is a cruelty in offering a decoration, no matter how civically, no matter how sincerely, to people, so may of whom are quite literally dying right now, at this very moment, for want of care.

NEXT

Part Two: Whose Speech?

I just made the argument as a citizen might make it. The City will not answer it as a citizen. It will answer it as a lawyer — with the cases it believes let it draw the line where it pleases. In the next installment I make the argument as I imagine a court might hear it, and show that the precedents the City would reach for place it in a bind.

Part Three: Banners Over Our Streets, Or Roofs Over Their Heads?

I’d love a program that honors our vets, and gives them a helping hand. Most people would. There are such programs. Designed to be replicable. We can pick one and bring it here.

I am a one-man band here — writer, editor, copy editor, fact-checker, legal consultant, publisher and moderator wrapped into one, publishing within a time line that is compressed from the weeks or even months of what is normally allowed for long-form investigative writing into sometimes as little as a few days. Errors and omissions are inevitable in work produced under these conditions. I rely on an informed public to identify them, and where they are identified, the record is corrected. This piece reflects my best understanding at the time of publication and is subject to revision as additional information becomes available.

Furthermore, there was no video and there are still no minutes of this meeting. As I was speaking myself, I was not taking my own notes, I was preparing for my turn. This is from memory.

* Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s art-house film Mother Küster’s Goes to Heaven, released in 1975, dramatizes how one woman’s grief over her husband’s killing of a foreman and then killing himself at a factory is taken up and spent by others — a sensationalizing press, a political party that adopts her cause and discards it when she is no longer useful — each converting her mourning into its own currency.

NOTES

1. The Hometown Heroes Banner Program began in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 2007, organized by Gold Star mother Ruth Stonesifer following the death of her son, Army Ranger Cpl. Kristofor T. Stonesifer, killed October 19, 2001, in a helicopter crash in Pakistan during the opening operations in Afghanistan. Participation and first-installation details per the program’s own accounts and contemporaneous Pennsylvania reporting.

2. Ruth Stonesifer, written remembrance of her son, quoted in coverage of the Gold Star Mothers and the banner program; the passage (“He wouldn’t understand all the fuss … He would not define his death as a sacrifice for his country”) dates to the months following his October 2001 death.

3. Quoted language is drawn from the sales and “how it works” materials of the originating Hometown Heroes banner vendor (a commercial outdoor-decoration company), which markets the program to municipalities as a turnkey package; comparable materials are offered by other vendors that now sell similar programs.

4. U.S. Merchant Mariners of World War II suffered among the highest casualty rates of any service (commonly cited as roughly one in twenty-six). They were denied veteran status for decades; following Schumacher v. Aldridge, 665 F. Supp. 41 (D.D.C. 1987), the review board granted veteran status to most WWII mariners on January 19, 1988 — more than four decades after the war.

5. Hank Gross, Mid-Hudson News, May 28, 2026, reporting Council Member McLymore’s description of the proposed program.

6. Point-in-Time count, January 2024: approximately 32,000–33,000 veterans experienced homelessness on a single night (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Annual Homeless Assessment Report). Severe rent burden among veteran households per HUD and Census American Community Survey data.

7. Combat deaths: Operation Iraqi/New Dawn and Operation Enduring Freedom totaled roughly 7,000 U.S. service members. Veteran suicide: more than 120,000 veterans are estimated to have died by suicide since 2001, a figure that exceeds the combat dead of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report; combat-death tallies per Department of Defense / Defense Casualty Analysis System).