Don't it just make your blood boil when you see somebody stomp on the American flag?
Of course it does. There's no other reaction to be expected from any reasonable and/or reasonably intelligent citizen of the good old U.S. of A.
Turns out flags ain't the only thing too often stomped in the land of the, give or take, free and the home of the, depends entirely on how you look at it, brave.
Madam Secretary is a weekly TV drama portraying the life and experiences of a fictional female American Secretary of State.
For the Hillary bashers in the cheap seats, sit your asses down and hush. The fictional Secretary Elizabeth McCord is a woman and is Secretary of State. And there endeth the similarity.
In what is both poetic irony and poetic justice in a period in American history that finds a misogynistic blunt tool of a blowhard bully taking up space behind the desk in the Oval Office, this fictional look at a fictional family whose Mom is the fictional head of the U.S. State Department was created, is produced and is, very often written, by......you know where this is going, right?.......
...of course you do.....
...a woman.
But the topic du jour is neither feminine empowerment nor egregious sexism. It has, actually, nothing to do with the whole "place of woman in the workplace, let alone society" debate/discussion. What follows could have just as easily been written by a man and offered up by a man.
But it wasn't and it wasn't. It was both written, and spoken, by women.
The impish provocateur lobe of my brain gets a tingly about that simply because it's yet another fun for all ages way of sticking it to the misogynist blunt tool behind the desk.
Who has, of late, been doing way, way....way more than his share of the aforementioned stompin'.
Not on the flag....at least, not exactly.
At the end of a recent episode of Madam Secretary, Elizabeth gives an address to a group gathered after one treaty signing or another, the usual gang of geopolitical suspects in attendance and articulates beautifully on one of what has been, until recent times, one of the qualities that made America shine...from sea to...well, you know the rest.
"What".....the Secretary begins, "... is an even greater threat than nuclear weapons? That which makes the use of them possible.
Hate.
Specifically, the blind hatred one group or nation can have for another.
And that is why I am convinced that nationalism is the existential threat of our time.
I want to be clear.
Nationalism is not the same as patriotism.
It's a perversion of patriotism.
Nationalism promotes the idea that inclusion and diversity represent weakness,
that the only way to succeed is to give blind allegiance to the
supremacy of one race over all others.
Nothing could be less American.
Patriotism, on the other hand, is about building each other up and embracing our
diversity as the source of our nation's strength.
"We the People" means all the people.
America's heroes didn't die for race or region.
They died for the ideals enshrined in our Constitution.
Above all, freedom from tyranny, which requires our unwavering support of a free press,
freedom of religion all religions the right to vote, and making sure nothing infringes
on any of those rights, which belong to us all.
Look where isolationism has gotten us in the past.
Two world wars.
70 million dead.
Never again can we go back to those dark times when fear and hatred,
like a contagion, infected the world.
That, as much as ending the threat of nuclear war, is what today is about.
And it's why we must never lose sight of our common humanity, our common values,
and our common decency.
I was reminded recently of our nation's founding motto, e pluribus unum.
Out of many, one.
13 disparate colonies became one country, one people.
And, today, we call on all Americans and people everywhere to reject the scourge of nationalism.
Because governments can't legislate tolerance or eradicate hate.
That's why each one of us has to find the beauty in our differences instead of the fear.
Listen instead of reacting.
Reach out instead of recoiling.
It's up to us.
All of us.
There are, at least, a couple of things noteworthy about that profound soliloquy.
It presents as empirical evidence of the power of words. The right words. At the right time, spoken in the right tone with good, sincere intent and in a spirit of seeking solutions.
And it underscores the irony, not to mention the injustice on display, of words written into a script for an episode of weekly television by someone who most assuredly would be branded with the scarlet letters, H and E for Hollywood Elite, with a dash of L and S for Libtard Snowflake, contrasted with the garbled, meandering, meaningless stirring of the shit pot theoretically disguised as "presidential" oratory.
Nationalism is not the same as patriotism.
It's a perversion of patriotism.
Don't it just make your blood boil when you see somebody stomp on the American flag?
Of course it does.
Does for me, too.
Just like when I see somebody stomp on sacred, bedrock foundational American values.
Like patriotism.
By equating it with nationalism.
Or, depending on your level of education and/or political affiliation, better known to you in a couple of more familiar versions.
America First.
and...
Make America Great Again.
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