I get it. I feel like I have been pushed to this place to live in a country that I do not recognize and identify with anymore. I used to actually believe we set the aspiration of being the beacon on the hill for others to follow. I used to believe the rhetoric about how we were all immigrants (excluding the natives) and how we made this country better. I thought we had the same idea to make the country better for everyone and those around us, but that we had different ideas on how to do it. I used to naively think, Nazism could never happen here. I used to think we we were on the side of human progress. Then I learned. I got older. I still naively held some of these beliefs.
All it took was a mediocre looking redhead to infiltrate the NRA. All it took was a few stupids to put their own self-interest above the country and party, only to find out their longevity within that party would be shortened. All it took was a known script from past authoritarians to reshape people into being horrible to one another. Demanding papers of others, while wearing a flag pin and a cross, and pushing people to drown in a river. To find the most vulnerable people and say "fuck em, die" instead of trying to welcome them. To repeatedly vote to create and normalize horrors of school children being slaughtered while we pretend to not know what the solution is, who caused it, and why. To repeatedly hear people demonize the ones who are sensible, trying to help (pandemic medical staff), to hold honest, educated people to higher standards than we hold the most powerful people in the world. To embrace and celebrate the profits of unhealthy food addictions, pharmaceutical drug addictions, and decreasing support for education in this country. To cravenly resist the rise of the oligarchy, as we witness the gilded age II surpass the original gilded age, while in the throes of the age of fraud.
So your experiences with the flag are different than mine. It was a background image mostly, but a symbol for both what I believed in, and also a banner for those who struggled, fought to change, fought to live, and fought to defend this country. But that is all stained now. It is a piece of cloth with words we don't give a fuck about, meanings we don't give a fuck about, and standards we don't even pretend to have. It is not a hope for the future, it is a symbol to smother the powerless and to bash into those who believe as naĂŻvely as I did.