MY FLAG TOO

A great friend was visiting from the East Coast last week and we took a walk in rain jackets under a pitiless blue sky. There was not a cloud in sight, although the weather app said there would be soon be rain. You really didn’t know whom to trust these days, certainly not the Baghdad Bob reports from the White House about the thriving economy, the necessity for the executions at sea, and the masked ICE occupations. But jeez, not even the upgraded weather app?

We walked along bumping shoulders, laughing as I reminded him of the greatest cartoon in the history of human life, that appeared in the New Yorker decades ago. It showed two emaciated scraggly prisoners chained to the wall of a cell, several feet off the ground. One has turned to the other and says, “Okay, here’s my plan. When the guard comes in to bring us our meals….”

“Didn’t it used to seem funnier?” I asked. We shook our heads. Until recently, on especially bad days, it felt like our reality. We didn’t have a big move. But we did have the No Kings rally, seven million of us from sea to shining sea.

Somehow my friend and I have gotten old, although we refer to this as “oldish.” With great friends, you can have periods of silence where the Dinah Shore in you doesn’t feel the need to start new conversations. Both of us noticed in the silence that the light had suddenly changed, and above us, the sky now hosted a menagerie of clouds. Somehow, the sky was darkening and lightening at the same time, with the sun mostly behind the new arrivals, blushes of light on either side of the screen.

Maybe that’s going on in America, too, the darkest darkening of my time here, while at the same time, thrilling election results, and Mr. Trump’s plummeting poll numbers. He may bomb Venezuela to try and keep suppressing the Epstein files, but sadly for him it won’t work. The truth always rises to the surface: not even J. Edgar Hoover could hide the truth of his partner Clyde. Poor old Mr. Trump: tick tock, tick tock.

I pointed out how a dozen clouds were now butting their heads against each other and the mostly hidden sun creating a silver thread that was outlining the trees on the hill.

“Okay,” I said to my friend. “Here’s my plan to save democracy from the Visigoths.”

“I’m all ears.”

“The left begins to loudly reclaim patriotism, a passion for the shared ideals of what America stands for: equality, justice, goodness, freedom, racial equality. America, the beautiful land of immigration, of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation.”

My friend gave me the same look my son gives me right before he starts mentioning his latest APlaceForMom.com search.

“Okay, fine; I know it’s not perfect. I know there are some problems.”

I mean, duh. Everything has problems. When my son was nine, we were driving to the bookstore where I taught a weekly class on writing.

“Why do these people want to learn to write?” he asked,

“Well, partly because they want to find out about life.”

“I already a know about life,” he said. “Pretty good; some problems.”

So yes, obviously: I remain a bit alarmed that we have not passed the Equal Rights Amendment, and that the Supreme Court is seemingly about to eradicate the Voting Rights Act, and so on and so forth.

But still, I suggested to my friend, what if Democrats started wearing flag pins, in vigorous support for America’s ideal.

“No,” he said. “Ixnay on the ag-flays.”

I understand the aversion. The flag-waving has always been on one side. Theirs, the Christian Nationalist Right. Sinclair Lewis famously said that when fascism comes to America, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Well, I wear a cross, and I love my country, and while I hate to brag, while teaching at a Code Pink retreat with Molly Ivins decades ago, we somehow got all those dubious women to join us in singing “America the Beautiful.”

You could hear the clouds say, “We are dark and we are light, and there’s a lot of water up here.” I saw snouts, Pokémons, and then a porthole of light.

I seriously believe in this proposal, although even my current husband basically pats me on the shoulder nicely when I bring it up. I make a case for it: the marches against the Vietnam War were deeply patriotic. They described an America that wasn’t defined by its imperialistic ambitions. The masses who marched wanted to make the country truly democratic, living up to the ideals of the Declaration.

“Okay, Plan B: What if people in the resistance start wearing upside down American flag pins, symbolizing America in distress?”

“I won’t be wearing any flag pin,” he said. “Not on a boat, not with a goat, not in a box, not with a fox.”

“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “What’s our next big move after the No Kings Rally?”

“Okay,” he said. “When the guard comes in to bring us our meals….”

Sigh. Until the midterms, with all power in the hands of the far right, we’ll just have to employ the same old things that always work—we’ll march, register voters, donate to causes who can help those most injured by the current spate of cruelty. Channel John Lennon saying that everything turns out okay in the end, and if things aren’t okay, it’s not the end. Stick together, pick up litter, plant bulbs in this dark grim rocky season, return phone calls and library books. How can that be enough? I don’t know. But it will be.

Everything is in flux right now—MJT and George Will in the same sandbox hating on Trump? I hadn’t seen that coming. Loyalties and alliances are shifting like the clouds across the sky, shaped like buffalos one minute, sea turtles a few minutes later, now stretching into alligators, and the next time you look up, cotton balls, floating all over wherever they want to go, with the grace of moving air.