V's Version

As you can imagine - due to the extremely dangerous wildfire situation here, fireworks have been banned this year.

We celebrated as a family anyway - with the local parade complete with fire trucks and candy throwing and (my favorite) the jazzercise class doing their mylar-draped shopping cart routine down the center of town. I dressed in my father's cowboy boots, a blue western-style skirt with a fluffy white petticoat and a red shirt tied with a star spangled banner belt.

I am a total geek when it comes to the 4th of July. I am not sure why I get all patriotic. It's not like I support our current leaders or all the havoc that nationalism has wreaked in this country or any other. But - somehow - I just get nostalgic.

I remember how my grandmother made mittens for people at the V.A. hospital and handed out the ubiquitous American Legion red poppies on Memorial day; how they raised the flag in their side yard and how my father looked in his Navy uniform and how taps was played as the Veterans folded the flag at my grandfather's funeral. I also remember how messed up so many Vietnam and Iraq Veterans were (including those in my own family) when they came back with drugs and PTSD and bitterness from the lies hiding behind the flag. But I think of why they did what they did and why they fought those battles on farmlands and over Europe and in rice fields and in the sand. I think of what it must have meant to draft the Declaration of Independence (and, perhaps more importantly, the Constitution.)



I cry sometimes at the National Anthem. Not because I want the bombs bursting in air - not because the creation of the home of the brave has meant the killing of so many native people and cultures- not because I care so very much about the flag itself but because of how the song reminds me of my family and of those nostalgic old days when all three television stations played it when they went off the air at midnight. My grandparents (and probably my father and definitely my mother in law) have lectured me on the importance of patriotism. I have had the whole "well, if you don't want to support the flag and all it stands for - why don't you move someplace else?" speech several times. I am not moved by it. I am, however, deeply moved by the community cohesiveness I feel just before a baseball game and by the memories of being in kindergarten learning the "Pilgrim's Pride" song.

It is true: I burned a question mark into my 7 foot American flag. (Please note that I am both the kind of gal that would have a 7-foot American flag and the kind that would burn it for the right reasons.) It was 1989 on the steps of the courthouse when the law gave the flag more attention than the rights of women who sought to retain choice in their reproductive lives.

Yes, I sincerely put my hand over my heart when the "Star-Spangled Banner" and the"America the Beautiful" are played but I am not blindly patriotic and beyond skepticism. I see what acts of terrorism have been perpetrated in the name of our country ('tis of thee). I hold both the ingrained respect for the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams and the abiding care of one who wants to retain those ideals in spite of the wishes of people who put flags (made in China) on their cars as they dismantle our Constitution one Patriot Act at a time.

I am an odd duck who loves the possibility of a world where we are all created equal and have the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I want these for everyone - as simple-minded as that is. The flag and the songs of my childhood represent the possibility of those rights and I will not let them be co-opted by hateful proselytizing zealots who demand lapel pins and a defense of heterosexual marriage and wire tapping.


I am so deeply grateful that I can (so far) live in a place where I love whom I love and worship how I worship without being killed or jailed that I am moved to wear red white and blue and walk down the center of my small town holding hands with my partner- representing geeky patriotic dykes everywhere.