Two Flags Flying

By Ted Glick —

For the last month or so there have been two small flags flying prominently outside the front door my and my wife’s house. One is an American flag, the other the Palestinian flag.

In the 46 years that Jane and I have been married we’ve never done anything like this. We’ve had issue-oriented signs in our front yard, and we’ve had Bernie, renewable energy, peace and other bumper stickers on the back of our car, but we’ve never flown flags where we’ve lived.

We’re flying the Palestinian flag because for over two years, since the terrible October 7^th Hamas attack on Israel and, afterwards, the hugely more terrible, genocidal attack on all of Gaza by the Netanyahu government, we have demonstrated almost every week in a nearby town calling for a ceasefire, an end to US military support of Israel and justice for the Palestinian people.

For those who know us, it isn’t a surprise that we’re doing this.

But flying the American flag? For a very long time we’ve not done so largely because, going back to the Vietnam War days, we have seen that it has been right-wingers and conservatives who primarily use that flag to advance often-racist and imperialist agendas. And it’s definitely the case that, historically, when the US has engaged in military campaigns against Indigenous nations or in overseas, imperialist military campaigns going back to 1898, the US flag has been there.

The US flag now flying outside our door was likely given to us by someone at the October 18 No Kings action which we helped to organize in our town, after we came back from our trip this summer to Montana to visit our grandson, son and daughter-in-law. We left home in mid-July and came back eight weeks later, in September.

We got to Montana by driving our all-electric, 2018 Chevrolet Bolt out and back, close to a 5,000 mile round trip. Here is how I described our reasons for doing so and what we learned from it in a past Future Hope column:

“One of the reasons we decided to travel this way was to experience very directly areas of the country we had never been to or not been to for a long time. We hoped all would go well mechanically, as well as our interactions with people along the way as we stopped to charge the car, camp or stay overnight in motels, eat in restaurants, get food and drink during rest stops and then, in southwest Montana, interact with others for the five weeks we were there.”I returned with a lot more hope about this country than I had before this trip. In the 12 states we went through or spent time in, most of them “red” or “purple,” we saw and heard very few signs of much support for Trump and his authoritarian government. I would estimate that, in all those eight weeks and thousands of miles, we saw no more than a dozen Trump signs and even fewer Trump hats or t-shirts being worn. People overwhelmingly were polite to us, as we were to them. There was virtually no evidence from these very many brief encounters that the USA at the grassroots has become a nasty, brutish, mean place.

“I am sure that if we had gotten into ideological/political discussions with the people we interacted with, most of them of European descent, there would have been some disagreements and tensions, but my sense is that, even when that were true, there would have been some points of agreement to be found.”

It was a hopeful trip. And the election results over the past month in many parts of the country, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, California and elsewhere, all of which showed a definite and significant shift away from the Trumpists, confirmed what we experienced.

Indiana was one of the states we went through, one of the most conservative of the northern US states. 80% of the members of the Indiana state senate are Republicans. But just a few days ago half of those Republicans, 20 out of 50 Senators in total, voted down a Trump-pushed plan to gerrymander US Congressional districts so that all nine of them would end up having Republican US House members after the November elections. Politically, this was huge, the latest sign that more and more Trump supporters are alienated by this would-be dictator and are willing to stand up to him publicly.

There are lots of reasons to believe that, if we all keep working and organizing day after day, increasingly united, 2026 will be a huge year, a clear and powerful repudiation of the Trumpists and their billionaire enablers.

Source: Ted Glick

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.