Fuck Your Flag

My kid doesn’t stand up for nor recites the Pledge of Allegiance. They tell me their teacher says they should “respect the flag because people died for it.”

Do not tell my child, my Brown, poor, neurodivergent, trans child to respect the flag of a country:
-That rips immigrant families apart
-That is perfectly OK with bombing Brown children overseas
-Which refuses to accept refugees, essentially sending them back to their deaths
-That fosters the type of attitude that makes it OK for a white woman to call the cops on a Native teen just trying to go to college
-Where we have to remind people that Water is Life
-Where Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have safe and clean water, 4 years later
-Where Black Lives Matter is seen as a threat
-Where compulsorily patriotism is allowed
-Where being trans can get you fired or worse and then you’ll be further disrespected in death
-Where Missing White Woman Syndrome was enough of a thing to be named but you still can’t name 5 missing or murdered Black and Brown girls and women
-Where people on welfare still don’t make enough to eat
-Where you even have to prove you’re good enough to deserve your basic needs met
-Where the president can admit to sexual harassment on tape but women are still blamed and shamed for coming forward
-That is doing nothing while their great-grandmother suffers in Puerto Rico
-Where people have to crowdfund their own healthcare
-Where the only option you give poor Black and Brown kids is joining a murderous military

You’re asking my child to ignore their humanity and the humanity of their family, friends and peers just to satisfy your own jingoistic values.  You tell them that people died for this flag but ignore all the atrocities committed for the flag. You think my child practicing their right to free speech is somehow more disrespectful than a country that sends young people off to fight wars for the rich where those young kids come back in body bags or disabled and then you leave them to languish in the streets, and to deal with a health care system that doesn’t take care of their mental or physical health.

If anybody is being disrespectful of the armed forces is the United States, not a little Puerto Rican kid.

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Fuck Your Flag
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