When I was in my teens, pre-9/11, I took flute lessons. The drive to my teacher's studio took me out on a semi-rural road near my hometown, where I would pass by the shed in the picture. In those days, though, it was just a white shed with a big black peace symbol painted on it. My budding-hippie-self always smiled to see it. I thought it would be there like that forever.
And then 9/11 happened. And then we declared war. And then later on we declared another war, this time against Iraq. And some time later in that school year, my senior year of high school, I drove home from my lesson, and where there had been a white shed with a black peace sign, there was a white shed, with a mostly-painted-over black peace sign covered by a freshly-painted-on American flag. That moment, that shed, printed itself indelibly in my mind, as the perfect symbol of everything that had suddenly gone so wrong in my world. I've always intended to go back and take a picture of it, to preserve the terrible sad contrast, of the symbol of peace abandoned and painted over in favor of the gaudy display of patriotism. After all, you can only have one. And we all know that a True American would rather have patriotism than peace.
Right?
4 comments:
Any increase in nationalism by any group, I'm coming to believe, is a net negative for the human race. Good post.
I agree. And I'm coming to realize more and more that I really emphatically *don't* value blind patriotism. The more I learn about the world, and other countries and cultures, the less I can swallow the idea of American superiority as it's been taught to me all my life. I just doesn't *work* for me anymore.
And I find it incredibly frustrating that there's a huge segment of my fellow Americans who genuinely feel that my unwillingness to worship at the phallic altar of American perfection means I must hate this country and everything it stands for. >.<
And next you are going to blame the US for the attacts of 9/11 right....
Whoa. Where the fuck did that come from? Please, do show me where anything I said leads directly (and apparently inevitably?) to conspiracy theories about government involvement in 9/11. I'm curious why you assume I think that.
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