In a Time of Terror, Protest Is Patriotism

I'm flying a flag these days. The Stars and Stripes, Old Glory, America's flag -- OUR flag! I've strapped it to my '97 made-in-the-USA Ford Escort, and I'm zipping around town as proudly as anyone else in the red, white and blue, like some modern-day Patrick Henry on wheels.

As with so many others, I'm flying our flag out of an assertive, perhaps defiant pride -- for I am proud, damned proud, to be an American citizen, and, in this time of true woe and deep national trauma, I'll be damned to hell before I meekly sit by and allow this symbol of our nation's founding ideals -- "liberty and justice for all" -- to be captured and defiled by reactionary autocrats, theocrats, xenophobic haters, warmongers, America-firsters, corporatists, militarists, fearmongers, political weasels, and other rank opportunists.

Our flag is no piece of sheeting for authoritarians to hide behind as they rend our hard-won liberties in the name of "protecting" us from a dangerous world. We Americans are not that frightened. Nor is our flag some bloody rag to be waved by politicians hoping to whip us into such a lust for vengeance that they can turn our people's republic into a garrisoned state, armed to the teeth and mired in a quasi-religious war that George W. defines as "this crusade" to "rid the world of the evildoers." We Americans are not that blind.

Our flag is the banner of freedom seekers, risk takers, democracy builders, rebels, pioneers, mavericks, barnraisers, and hellraisers -- a liberty-loving people who are naturally suspicious of authority and able to detect that the real threat to our land of the free comes not from afar, but from within.

Our flag is made of strong democratic cloth, artfully designed and painstakingly stitched together over 225 years -- liberty by individual liberty, people's movement by people's movement. Our flag embodies a democratic continuum that connects us today to the pamphleteers and Sons of Liberty, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the abolitionists and the suffragists, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, the populists and Wobblies, Mother Jones and Joe Hill, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.

"The first job of a citizen is to keep your mouth open," wrote German Nobel Prize winner Gunther Grass. The Powers That Be are not interested in having a national conversation, but I believe we must push for one from the grassroots up. Open your mouth -- "Hey, I'm an American, red-blooded and true, and here's what that means to me; what do you think?"

Americans desperately need to talk -- about what our society is, where we're headed, what kind of future we're creating for the next generation. Our fellow citizens are eager to engage. Early one morning, as I sat in a coffee shop writing two days after the terrorist assault, a fellow in a suit and tie stepped over to me. I didn't know him, but he said that he occasionally read my weekly columns and felt the need to acknowledge something: "I mostly don't agree with you," he blurted, "but I guess today, we're all Americans."

Indeed. Let's talk.

What astonishes me is not that the Powers That Be would want to stifle any talk that doesn't assert lock-step "patriotism," but that so many weak-kneed progressive leaders have counseled hiding our light under a bushel and withdrawing from the noble field of protest.

For example, an internal memo to Sierra Club leaders mewed, "We strongly need to avoid any perceptions that we are being disrespectful to President Bush." Hello? Protest is not disrespectful. It is the essence of American democracy, of America itself, and it is especially essential when a muddleheaded guy like George W. sits in the President's chair, totally dependent on the military establishment and corporate elite, thrusting our sons and daughters (theirs won't have to go) into an unlimited and secretive world war against terrorists supposedly entrenched in 60 nations, while simultaneously rushing to Congress with a package of 51 "emergency" antiterrorism bills to put some convenient crimps and cuts in America's Bill of Rights.