THE BETTER PART OF PATRIOTISM.

• Date: 01 October 2020
• Author: Hightower, Jim

I'm flying a flag these days. The Stars and Stripes, Old Glory, America's flag, OUR flag! I've strapped it to my 2011 made-in-the-USA Ford Fiesta, and I'm zipping around town as proudly as anyone else in the red, white, and blue Bubbaland of South Austin, like some modern-day Patrick Henry on wheels.

As with so many other Americans, 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 divide, I'll be damned to hell before I meekly sit by and allow this symbol of our nation's founding ideals of 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 Trump. Nor is our flag some bloody rag to...