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Goddammit America, flags are not a Trump thing
When I stopped by my parent’s house this steamy Fourth of July, the front yard was lined with American flags. I asked whether the Boy Scouts put them up, as they sometimes do for a fundraiser.
No, said my aunt, visiting from out of town, “I got them for your dad, but he thought they were kind of a Trump thing.”
Interesting.
This is a sentiment I have heard before.
Apparently, the American flag, which has flown over this country in some iteration for more than two hundred years, is now synonymous with a 74-year-old blow hard who enjoys running roughshod over our democracy.
Aww hell no.
You do see an awful lot of American flags at Trump rallies, but you also see them at community parades and in Perkins parking lots. I like to think it’s only because his supporters lack creativity. So many of them have conflated nationalism with patriotism until patriotism feels icky to the rest of us.
Now, we are saddled with a flag that many value above the ideals it represents. We are stuck with a flag that doesn’t feel representative for large swaths of our population — people of color, for example, for whom liberty and justice always seems just out of reach. We are weighed down by a flag that has been deemed a stand-in for…
