Memorial Day and Patriotism
Due to the recent surge in Nationalism, I imagine this Memorial Day weekend will see patriots flocking to the cemetaries at sunrise to listen to a bugler play "TAPS." To my knowledge, I have no dead soldiers on my family tree. Of course, my family tree as revealed to me is a dwarf.
Why does the south seem to have a greater abundance of patriotism than the East Coast, where I live, and yet so many in the south still cling to their Confederate past? Isn't the Confederacy the antithesis of American patriotism? Wasn't the purpose of the Confederacy to destroy the United States? It seems very contradictory to me.
After September 11 (no year required), we bought our first American flag. I found instructions on the web on how to hang the flag properly and how to care for it as prescribed by law. I took the flag in at night and when it rained, careful to never let it touch the ground.
Then came the war in Iraq. Warmongers hijacked the flag as a symbol of the war and support for Bush, and at least for now it has lost its value to me as a symbol for American freedom. So I folded the flag into a triangle and put it on a closet shelf.
It surprises me how many people seem to think Bush = America and that to dislike Bush is to dislike America. If you hang out on Yahoo message boards (and I'm not sure I recommend it), there's no shortage of Bush lovers telling anyone who doesn't like Bush's politics to move to France.
We live in a democracy so that we don't have to leave when we don't like the current administration. Instead we can organize and make the administration leave. I am tired of people telling me that I hate America because I don't like Bush or support his illegal war. The president is not America. The Constitution is America, and right now this president's administration and their supporters are not upholding the principles of the Constitution, which include the right to dissent, among other things.
I will give Bush credit for one thing--he has motivated me like no other politican to become directly involved in politics. This year, I will swallow my shyness and go door to door to campaign for the Democratic candidates. I admit I'm a little worried some Bush supporter will blow me off his porch with his now-legal Uzi. My list of grievances against the Bush administration is longer than a triple-roll of toilet paper. I hope to see him retired in 2004.
12:44:26 PM 
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