Sunday, July 04, 2004
Give us back our damn flag!
We on the left have for many years now been tarred with the brush of un-patriotism, if not outright treason. Nothing could be further from the truth. We love our country as much as, if not more than, any rah-rah jingoist.
In an L.A. Weekly op-ed piece called Give Us Back Our Damn Flag: The leftist case for patriotism, Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks make a case for liberals and progressives to reclaim our right to be seen as patriots, and to claim the flag as a symbol of our patriotism. The difference between blind patriotism and what the left has is that we don't see only the good - we also see how much there is that can be better. It's like the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam - we don't just take the world as is, it's our job to make it better than we found it.
We on the left have for many years now been tarred with the brush of un-patriotism, if not outright treason. Nothing could be further from the truth. We love our country as much as, if not more than, any rah-rah jingoist.
In an L.A. Weekly op-ed piece called Give Us Back Our Damn Flag: The leftist case for patriotism, Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks make a case for liberals and progressives to reclaim our right to be seen as patriots, and to claim the flag as a symbol of our patriotism. The difference between blind patriotism and what the left has is that we don't see only the good - we also see how much there is that can be better. It's like the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam - we don't just take the world as is, it's our job to make it better than we found it.
