So now we have an actual adult human being in the Oval Office again. The grease and french fry smells have hopefully aired out, I don’t have to wake up every day to see some privileged old white (orange) man lay claim to victimhood from the most powerful office there is, and the world is a bit easier to breathe in. But we do have a long road back from the last four years, there’s no denying that.
We have seen some moves made already, and happily so, but I believe we need to put some focus on fixing that cracked, busted, charred up husk of a soul we’ve been dragging around for a while now. And that starts with taking back a few of our symbols, and I have a notion or three to get us rolling.
Remember that hand gesture where you make a circle with the points of your thumb and forefinger and stick the other three fingers in the air to convey an (often sarcastic) “okay?” Boy, I sure do. When I was a kid sitting in the gigantic backseat of my dad’s old Ford Galaxie, any time someone cut him off or slammed on their brakes for no reason or made a sudden turn without signaling, he would throw up that hand and say with all the disdain he could muster, “Oooookaaayyy!”
I loved that. People were so stupid.
Now though, if he were to throw that gesture at some bozo in traffic, he’d be thought a white supremacist, which is a pretty ridiculous concept to anyone who knows the man. Personally, I find it offensive that one of my favorite little bits of nostalgia has been jerked out from under me by a bunch of, well, jerks. If they want a hand gesture of their own, let them have the one where you stick your finger in your mouth and pretend to make yourself vomit. It suits them better.
There’s lots of little things like that floating around. “We the People” tattoos being flaunted by people who’ve likely never read the Constitution, evil looking drawings of a stylized skull, co-opted from a vigilante comic book character who routinely murders people with little thought or remorse, the outright theft of the letter ‘Q’, and so on. We could knock those out pretty easily, I bet. Maybe Punisher Skulls on tee shirts, but with happy faces on them? Or maybe shirts with big ‘Q’s’ on them, but the ‘Q’ is actually just the beginning of something dumb, like “Qrazy for your love”, or something like that? It’s a start, anyway. Get creative. Fight stupid with Satire; it’s the most entertaining way.
Ultimately though, our goal needs to be the Stars and Stripes, the honest to goodness mother loving flag of the United States of America itself. I am all done seeing this flag worn as t-shirts, pants, and of all things a mask designed to catch droplets of spit. What kind of patriot walks around with the symbol of their country wrapped around their face to catch their slack jawed slobber? Seems to me you’d want to keep spit off of something that important.
By the by, as someone who was forced to salute and pledge allegiance to the thing every morning as a child, I think making it a part of your company’s logo is a thoroughly disrespectful and grossly obvious attempt at manipulation, and anyone who falls for it ought to be embarrassed. Come up with your own logo, you lazy bums, you.
Besides, we’ve got all these human horror shows running around waving nazi flags and Confederate battle flags, these flags of foreign (defeated) armies, so how is it these boneheads also fly the American flag? It’s obviously not the one that represents what they believe in. If it was, they wouldn’t need the others, would they? More importantly, why are we not making a big deal out of it? When did that decision get made? Was I on a break or something?
Another by the by: that Stars and Bars flag you see flying around was never even the flag of the Confederate States of America, it was a short lived battle flag that was later popularized by, you guessed it, a bunch of racists. So shut up about this “heritage not hate” crap already.
So let’s start flying some flags with those BLM signs, let’s put them up with all of those pride flags, too. Those are signs of liberty and bravery, and those are the symbols our flag should be with.
-John
