Waving Flags for Dissent, the Highest Form of Patriotism

When I got the call from the Minnesota Feminist Caucus a few weeks ago that I had been selected for one of their awards, the first question that flashed through my mind was who told them about that time I publicly burned all my panty hose?

The second thought was that I couldn't accept an award because I don't usually. I've shied away from public recognition for a lot of reasons. (Even before Bush cast doubt upon the practice of award-giving generally by giving so many presidential medals to his sycophants, basically turning awards into rewards for blindly following his wrongful orders, i.e. Tenet, Bremer, Podhoretz). Really it's just my simple belief that it's better to give than to receive.

But also immediately, after hearing that Koryne Horbal and Jane Fonda would be involved, I realized what a wonderful opportunity lay ahead for me to use this moment to thank these great ladies for their lifetimes of speaking truth to power, for their patriotic dissent, to thank all the feminists in this room and of history, in fact, who helped pave the way to where we are today.

I'd especially like to thank, for instance, the feminists who fought for Title 9 in the 1960s, which finally made competitive sports available to girls like me and in my personal case, allowed me, beginning my sophomore year, to run on our high school's first ever girls track team.

Then I also want to thank the feminists who were pressuring the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, in the last years of his life, to open up the FBI agent position to women. Hoover, who of course had spent his life disdaining women, was under so much pressure -- since the FBI was one of the last federal agencies to discriminate this way -- that he ordered these really weird justifications to be written up about why the agent position must be restricted to "one breed" only -- males. The poor guy who was assigned this creative writing task based a lot of his false reasoning, coincidentally, on physical fitness attributes (which go back to the prior non-availability of sports for women). Few people know this, but J. Edgar was forced to pen his own unique counter-version of the Feminine Mystique which he entitled The Feminine Touch and which was all about how staying "feminine" meant staying happy with the clerk or secretary (GS-2 and 3) jobs then available to women at the FBI. So it was only due to the women's rights movements and their threat at the time of a class action lawsuit, that when Hoover died, the FBI's policy changed and I was even able to get into this law enforcement profession.

Anyway, I got this brilliant idea. Actually my husband, who himself is a really great feminist supporter (as he never would have put up with me all these years if he wasn't), got the brilliant idea. You know how flags are valued and given away as tokens of patriotism when they have flown in combat or over the Capitol? Apparently, in fact, there are people who do nothing all day but raise and lower flags, one after another, hundreds of them, over the nation's Capitol, just to authenticate them for this purpose.

But we'd never heard of giving away a flag that had flown over the most patriotic of all activities: DISSENT. We all know, of course, the famous quote from no less an authority than the author of our country's Declaration of Independence, Founding Father and third President Thomas Jefferson that "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Jefferson knew that true fearlessness and patriotism are much more than going along with the crowd, blind loyalty, or following orders, that practicing moral courage is harder and rarer than even physical courage. This is what feminists like the suffragettes and all those who have bucked the power structure and worked for unpopular causes, like equal rights and putting an end to war, know. Rarely is this so evident as when a nation is AT war and protection of civil liberties clashes head on with exigencies of the war effort.

So, if Ms. Horbal and Ms. Fonda will accept them, and I wish I had more to give to every feminist in the room, but I've only got these two, there are two souvenir flags held by my beautiful assistants in the back of the room to give out after we've concluded. We got the photographic proof guaranteeing both of these flags flew high and proud during these last few years at various community peace vigils and protests against torture, indefinite detention without due process, illegal surveillance of Americans; and warnings to our fellow citizens against starting new unjustified wars. We get ridiculed by some for even caring this much about these issues but we feel it is our patriotic duty to continue to speak out.

Peace is patriotic, thinking is patriotic, caring is patriotic and dissent is patriotic! And I can't think of a cause more worth celebrating with these token flags then these feminists' lives of patriotic service, caring and dissent.

P.S. So could this "highest form of patriotism" catch on? After my talk yesterday to Minnesota Feminists, I see today that our "Dissent IS Patriotic" team might need to get busy and authenticate more flags to award the team of U. S. women at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month whose spur-of-the-moment protest apparently rankled the U.S. Bridge Federation's less patriotic officials.