Ask Lemmy

You're in good company. Germans have a similar relationship with their flag.

For me it's been longer than that. I am a queer Canadian and anytime I have travelled the US or stayed with friends and seen any group carrying or wearing American flags that hasn't given me the "ick" so much as rung alarm bells that those people are not safe.

Thing is, it's the same thing with the Canadian flag. Any group flying too many Canadian flags outside of Canada Day is likely to be Conservative and anti-queer. Anti-Trans protesters or anti-vaxxers on highway overpasses? Canadian flag. Lifted truck soaring down the highway with a "Fuck Trudeau" bumper sticker - Canada flag. Hoard of protesters demanding book bans, group of people protesting Pride with a "you are gunna burn pedos" sign, antiDEI crusader mob - Canadian flag. It doesn't take long before one starts to draw certain conclusions about a person's character when they wave it around. For those of us trans folk who can it's a sign to hide. A literal red flag.

Amoungst the left up here the flag is a complicated symbol. Many of us on the West Coast see it as a symbol of colonial practice and an insensitive declaration of an occupying nation on stolen territory for people who are still here and whose original sovereignty is still not properly acknowledged. It's not a symbol of pride and if personally used as such it's a sign of insensitivity and work to be done. At the same time I would not say that I am not proud of my Country for how far we've come. We are a nation in therapy who has the opportunity to put the work in to getting over some really bad murderous and selfish flaws and try new things to make things right. When I had an American friend up here it took a bit for him to understand how seriously the effort is to recon with our past and he treated us like a utopia of leftist sentiment but it is like therapy, yeah we might be putting the work in - but we can see how much further we need to go and praise doesn't hit us as "job well done" it's a reminder of how shitty it still is. But if anyone ever thinks that this complicated and nuanced relationship to country would stop us from rallying together to fight to preserve our rights to keep working towards that better future they would be dead wrong.

So I understand pretty well where you're coming from but for a lot of us this isn't a particularly new thing. It just is affecting more and more people as they wake up to realizing how these symbols are used.

My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason, identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American” things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion, barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained capitalism.

That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

In my opinion, true patriotism requires being critical of your nation. A patriot doesn't blindly let their nation go to hell. The Republicans that have take the word "patriot" are not patriots, in my opinion. They've ruined the word. A patriot wants to find the issues with their nation and improve them, not yell about being the best and to ignore everything wrong.

Basically, yes. I feel the same as you about the flag, but because it's been used as a symbol of blind faith, not patriotism. I feel patriotic pride in being critical, not in saying a pledge or anything like that.

No, you've started to see things more clearly.

It really only feels appropriate to see it upside down these days.

I agree that our history has always been fucked up. But there are degrees of fucked up-ness and we're officially leaving the measurement scale.

It's fucking over.

Same, I just feel kind of gross now when I see it. Sad as I still love my country, just not what it's doing now.

Tbh I think flag hate or angst is about as useful/less as flag worship. If you need something to be preoccupied with, why not make it a problem you can put that energy into doing something about where you live - like homeless people or food aid.

I might be reacting this way because I've been getting recent emails from my college about changing the school mascot, which is a "pioneer". When I was there I don't remember even being aware that there was a mascot. But apparently they think "pioneer" might be too closely associated with colonialism and they've decided this is an important issue. My attitude is create a Native American scholarship (or anything that actually does something) - don't obsess on imagery.

Even as a kid, I never understood how the USA flag could be a symbol of "freedom" while conscription exists. Today it has gone from a generally indifferent lie to borderline offensive

Any day you're able to rise above the cult of nationalism is a good day.

The same happens in Spain if you are leftist since the civil war, even before maybe.

I am a US citizen but have been living abroad for the last 4.5 years. I can get by with Norwegian language but didn’t really feel hyper compelled to speak it all the time as English is spoken widely and well here. But especially since the inauguration it’s like, I don’t want strangers to realise that not only am I a foreigner, I’m an American. I try to be a good ambassador through my actions and words, but there’s only so much I can do to distance myself from broad brush strokes of “Americans” anymore and honestly is embarrassing. Also I feel deeply sad that I feel like I can never go home. That place just isn’t real anymore.

Yes and no.

You can can display an American flag and not be a facist. Facists can’t co-opt the US flag.

The flags that look similar to the American flag, but have a blue line or are black/grey are the ones that cringe me up. Those are actual false flags and are anti-patriotic. Right up there with the “rebel” flag.

Maybe get a tiny little flag and put it in your garden.

Team america, world police

We suck.

I am from Canada, and while the flag could go either way for me, mounties, even in their blood-red uniforms do turn my stomach. (Paintings by Kent Monkman, showcasing the "Sixties Scoop"

Our past further back has not been much help.

In addition to the physical appropriation of land was the colonial effort to eliminate the transmission of cultural identity, traditional skills, and connection to the land. Beginning in 1883 (while this was the date of the first federally established church school, similar institutions existed as early as the 1830s, years before Canadian federation) Indian Residential Schools (IRSs) were established in Canada (as were American Indian Boarding Schools in 1862). Children were forcibly removed from their families and were institutionalized in IRSs with the explicit goal of ‘taking the Indian out of the child’. These mandated church-run IRSs endeavoured to save the souls of the ‘savages’ by immersing them in Euro–Christian beliefs and eradicating access to traditional socialization values, language, practices and ways of life. By the 1930s, roughly 75% of First Nations children attended IRSs, as did many Métis and Inuit children. The last of the IRSs was closed in 1996, but by then several generations of children had experienced the mistreatment that abounded in these institutions.

Then to really prove we could be as evil as everyone thinks we're polite, we added this gem to our crown.

"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem." -Duncan Campbell Scott to BC Indian Agent Gen. Major D. MacKay.

And there are those who say it is in the past, and everyone is crying over things from long ago, yet 1996 is not so long ago for Residential Schools, and our police deny any ongoing wrong-doings. I for one do not feel patriotism for our past, though I have some small hope for our future.

I've always felt pride in the ideals of my nation, and shame from its actions.

But at least I still hold onto the ideals. It's not nothing.

No

No

If you think every time you see the US flag the person with it is a fascist get off the internet for a while. Most people are not nazis.

The flag doesn't bother me but the pledge to it does. The traitor flags (Confederate battle flag and one bearing a president's name) do.