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It's the week after September 11th. President Bush asks all Americans to put a flag outside their window at half mast.
It's a month after September 11th - Bush asks all Americans to put flags out full mast - we're not in mourning anymore, he says.
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years comes and goes.
It is now six months later, and how many flags do you still see? After September 11th, when I walked up and down my block in Queens, all I saw was red, white, and blue. Then, the flags came down to make way for Halloween decorations. And they never went back up.
This kind of bothers me. OK, so some people just aren't patriotic. No big deal. But now, all of a sudden, people are taking their flags in their houses, off their cars, and out of their windows. So September 11th and the war on terrorism isn't being featured on every newspaper and Time Magazine cover anyomre. That doesn't mean things aren't stil happening. The war isn't over yet. Does it really take that muck to hang a flag in a window or ouside a door? I think not.
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apples |
07:52pm Mar 20, 2002 EST |
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everybody around her always has their flag out
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Sergei |
03:19am Mar 21, 2002 EST |
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What about me? I never put a flag up to begin with because I hate the United States of Amerika, and the war doesn't erase the bad things this government has done (and the bad things it continues to do). You got a problem with that?
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Sergei |
03:30am Mar 21, 2002 EST |
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Also, for some of these people their mood genuinely changed back as the months went by. A lot of the people who rushed to buy a flag on September 12, let's face it, were badmouthing America just a week earlier. The fear, blind urges for nuclear war, and feeling too affected to live a normal life disappeared, and the patriotism that came along with those feelings was only a knee-jerk reaction for many of these people. Now that the special "September 11 emotion" is an endangered species, with people announcing it's back to normal, etc., these same people may be admitting to themselves that their patriotism was never really genuine and was not well-thought-out, ahead of time.
As one 47-year-old woman in my neighborhood who was one of the many people her age who "got behind Bush" said last January, "Just don't know what I was thinking!"
The patriots to look for are the ones who announced their patriotism long before the attack. After an attack that, in the end, changed nothing, these people should all be keeping their flags up to the end (of the war that is, if not even longer), because if they haven't been changed at all these long-time patriots should still be so.
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