Don't Hijack My Flag
It's 9/11. On this day in 2001, I was living in Arizona, on my way to a client's house, and saw it on TV when I got there. I knew someone whose husband died in the Towers on that day. The shock and horror and lack of clarity that surrounded those events and in the months and years that followed seemed like we had tipped the scale, heading in the direction that is so obvious today. The hate and bigotry, anti-Muslim sentiment, and what I call the hijacking of our flag, with willfully blind loyalty to some high ranking government officials who were rushing to decisions not based on fact, was the beginning of our backtracking. Suddenly everyone had those flag decals, ribbons, and was rushing to judgement. John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush took our country in a scary direction, on false premises, and got a bunch more people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And here we are, eighteen years later, with a complete nutcase in the White House who just fire...