It was 1974, and I was thirteen years old. My father was terminally ill with cancer, and we watched John Wayne movies every Sunday. I am often reminded of his disapproval when I wore a pair of jeans, hand me downs from an older hippie cousin, with an emblem of the American flag on the back pocket. "You’re going to sit on the symbol of our country?” Dad would be appalled to see that it is perfectly acceptable to wear the American flag as a sweatband today, and surprised to see who it was who is wearing it. I never wore those pants again. He didn’t tell me I couldn’t. That was not his way, but his disapproval was enough for me.
I was hardly raised to be a radical liberal, and I would argue that I am not, although I don’t much mind losing that argument, either. Dad, at least initially, would have been on board with criticizing Michelle Obama when she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country”. To his credit, he probably would have eventually moved past the knee-jerk patriotism to a more adult version that included the First Amendment. He would wonder just what she what happened in her life to make her feel that way. He would have tried to see he point in context, rather than twist it to support his own beliefs. He would have reminded us all that at age seventeen he had quit high school to enlist so he could protect her right to say what she felt, and that her experience, growing up black in America, was vastly different from ours. He prided himself in being fair. (And Dad, you were.)