Violence fails to muzzle free speech

Family becomes target for flying American flag upside down

By Darryl Swan

The South County Spotlight, Dec 11, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (15 Reader comments)

Darryl Swan / South County Spotlight

Cari’ssa, Madison and Mark Karol-Chik have faced vandalism as a result of their dissent with Bush aministration policies, including having a rock (shown in hand) thrown through 13-year-old Madison’s bedroom window.

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On an early Saturday morning, around 1 a.m., in November an unknown assailant flung a rock the size of a softball through the bedroom window of 13-year-old Madison Karol-Chik.

Glass sprayed out to the far side of the room and the rock left an indentation in a type of rigid netting Madison had strung as decoration.

“That had to be thrown with some real force,” said Cari’ssa Karol-Chik, Madison’s mother.

Madison had fallen asleep in the living room that night and fortunately had avoided the rain of glass.

But the attack illustrates the most recent, and most brazen, attack on the Karol-Chik family since they began flying the American flag upside down three years earlier.

Flying an upside down flag, says Cari’ssa and her husband, Mark, is intended as a political demonstration of their increasing frustration with the Bush administration and its policies, and started soon after Bush was elected to his second term in the White House in 2004.

“I said, at that point, if this happens I’m going to put my flag upside down as a sign of distress,” Mark, a Democrat, said of Bush’s 2004 election victory.

“I was really nervous when he first put it up,” Cari’ssa said.

The demonstration was met with almost immediate retaliation, however. The back window of the family’s 1963 Econoline pickup was smashed out with a rock selected from a nearby pile. Golf balls and pool balls have been thrown at the house, each with notes taped to them condemning the flag expression.

Eggs have been smashed against the house which, given its location on the relatively busy corner of Columbia Boulevard and Vernonia Road in St. Helens, has prompted angry cat-calls for its perceived unpatriotic flavor in this blue-collar city of around 12,000 people.

Even worse, Sabastian Karol-Chik, 19, the son of Mark and Cari’ssa, was surrounded while a senior at St. Helens High School and told by hostile classmates that they were going to burn down his family’s house.

Reaching out

Not all of the response has been negative.

Mark said he was working outside in the summer when a sergeant in the U.S. National Guard in full military dress approached him.

Mark tensed at first, he said, but the guardsman only wanted to shake his hand for exercising the fundamental American freedom — the freedom of speech.

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