I got into it online with a liberal friend of mine who wants to "take back flags and crazy badass eagle images" from the right. & it made me real disappointed, because this is a problem with liberals.

I really don’t think I can handle an America where pickup trucks have oversized Biden/Harris flags flapping from them, I told her.
Maybe we can take back competent governance and civic responsibility and unions & shit before we go spiking the ball.

But for my friend, it was a question of branding, of iconography. "The icons of our country have basically been stolen and we need to take it back," she said. "Our American flag has nearly been stolen by MAGA and we can't have that. Basically that is all I am saying."

The problem is that the M*GA types are correct about what the flag means. The other side can, and does, back up its jingoistic symbolic aggression with actual violence, greed and stupidity. What, I asked my friend, can you do under the stars & stripes to counteract that image?

Once we can provide a tangible alternative for the symbol to represent we can reclaim it. But I don’t think merely waving a flag more emphatically is going to change people’s minds about what it’s come to mean. Reclaim what America IS and the symbols will catch up.

When we have a country that does not glorify imperialism, greed, violence and racism, the American flag will start to mean something different.
When we are known for our bridges & not our bombs, for our poets & not our con artists, Old Glory will take on a different connotation.

But my friend didn't want to hear that. She didn't want to hear about the work that needs to be done, let alone do any of it. She wants Liberal Thanos to snap his fingers and turn America into an episode of Full House. And it made me sad, because there's so much work still to do.