Editor's Note: I am by nature an optimist. Given enough time, I can overlook quite a bit of pain to get to the promise. Over the next three weeks, it will be tempting to tune out. I get it. The daily outrages are going to get worse and try to seize all the energy. I would encourage you to hold on to your power and be proud of it. Vote, talk, spend, support, love, encourage. This is not a time to ignore.
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I recently read about a house in Detroit with a forty-foot arch of rainbow flowers over the front door. Big letters that spelled out Pride, Peace, Love, Dance, Hugs, and Resist. The owners (a straight couple) wanted their block to know it was a safe place to walk.
During a neighborhood home and garden tour, a man asked them to take down the one thing that offended him, the Pride flag, on account of his religion. It wasn’t the flowers or the words spelling love. Out of all the houses and all the yards, it was the flag.
He walked past the word Love to take offense in the name of a faith that promotes love.
I kept thinking about how much people put into symbols, and how a symbol can represent a type of belonging.
Belonging is the oldest hunger we have. Older than money, older than writing, maybe older than language, and for most of the time we have existed, knowing your clan from the other clans wasn’t just nice, it was survival. From there came the whole concept of symbolism. Tribe, area, beliefs, clubs, organizations. The colors on the shield and the clothing. Your safe space there and mine here. The symbols became the shortcuts for the small tired brain.
I see this wish to belong everywhere I go. Humans by nature are not solitary creatures, and we like to show a belonging by our clothes, cars, clubs, and cliques.
The trouble starts when the symbol matters more than the people it was meant to gather. The dangerous version is when a group's entire mission is to grow itself at the cost of another group. Religion and politics run that play better than anyone, because both are in the business of belonging. It has gotten bad enough that the people who study our politics have started borrowing the vocabulary of faith to describe it, calling it sectarianism, because a political party now behaves like a religious sect, sorting the world into the saved and the damned.
Both politics and religion learned the same lesson a long time ago. Get them young. The fastest way in is early, before the questions arrive. Catch a person in their youth and you never have to win the argument.
The man in the yard was looking at a symbol of someone else’s belonging, and he had been trained, patiently, over years, to read it as a threat. The symbol is now preloaded. It does the reasoning for him. By the time a person can drive and own a home and be a neighbor, they can look at a yard full of flowers and miss the mystery and beauty of life entirely. They see only a threat, and never once notice they skipped the part where a person is supposed to think beyond symbols.
There is exactly one symbol worth keeping, and it is the only one nobody can sell you, because it does not come with a gift shop or a rival or a flag to plant on a lawn.
It’s being a good human.
I have my own set of symbols, my own clans. I am an American, brought up in the Christian tradition, a Cardinals fan, a Peace Corps volunteer, a Jaguars fan, a career public servant, and a university alumnus.
Every one of those is a banner I fly, but none means anything beyond being a good human. Without that, they’re just bits and pieces of clothing. The disaster starts the instant you mistake the jersey for yourself.
It’s not which tribe or which flag. It’s which planet, and what a decent person actually owes the stranger standing next to them.
Reader Response
Disagree with me? Think I missed something? Hit reply and tell me directly, or open this issue on the web and scroll to the very bottom, past the poem, to leave a public comment and read what everyone else said.
A charismatic church in a peeling storefront in Maryville, Tennessee has decided the demons are literal and local, and one of them apparently lives across the street at the town's longtime bookstore. I grew up in a church, and the line this crosses is the one beyond faith. It is the moment certainty overpowers evidence and starts needing a neighbor to be a scapegoat.
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Rick Steves has spent forty years telling Americans that the cure for fear is travel, and he has not stopped, telling a Bellingham crowd this spring that the playbook the dictators ran on Europe a century ago is the same one running now, ours included. Watch him work a room (clip here) and you see what leadership actually looks like without a title attached to it: a guy who keeps introducing us to our neighbors and refuses to let us be afraid of them.
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A school board in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota got tired of a dozen teachers putting small rainbow stickers on their classroom doors, so in July it banned every sticker, button and poster the district did not pay for. Call it viewpoint neutral if that helps you sleep. Two students sued in September. A sticker that tells a frightened kid he is safe in that room is not a political slogan, and a school board that cannot tell the difference between being good humans, education, and ideology needs to be voted out.
One professor at West Point refused to sit down (The Washington Post)
I thought about putting this as a Public Servant of the Week. Tim Bakken has taught law at West Point since 2000, longer than any civilian in the academy's history. After Trump's January executive order told the service academies to purge anything "un-American" or "divisive," West Point began requiring faculty to get approval before publishing or giving a speech. Bakken said it violated the First Amendment. A colonel told him to stop talking and sit down. Then he sued and won, though not without some cost.
Public servants who held the line
Americans are being subjected to what it feels like living under the rule of whims by one man. There are so many injustices, that many are quickly being forgotten. There is a particular kind of courage that doesn't make the news. Across this administration, career public servants, people who spent decades learning the machinery of government, who believed the job was bigger than any one person, have been shown the door for refusing to bend. They held the line then paid for it.
Public service has always been political in the small-p sense: you navigate, you compromise, you survive, but you do it for a shared, higher purpose. There is a difference between knowing how to navigate a position and being conscripted into a cult of loyalty. I’ve felt that pressure in almost every public job I’ve had. The buck is supposed to stop at the office, not any one man. These fired public servants understood that. When this time passes, and it will, our job will be to put these dedicated Americans back where they belong.
America That Once Was
Marc J. Yacht
America that once was
Was once an America that
Did things in a way that made
People call it the American way,
With pride and the rest that went with being Proud of one's
Country and flag waving and things
That make you glad you're alive
And still young.
But with age comes decay for all lovely things
Must wither and die even when cared for,
And sometimes I think I'm too old
And have withered and won't bloom again next year
Though I'm sure I'll grow, yet not more beautiful.
Smells, factories and the like along with
Traffic and the rest, poor policy too
I can't miss that on a bet and other things
Yet, I still sing red, white, and blue.
Even with Graft and things that make me cringe
Five dollars a vote for instance, forever wars
And the things that cut green grass
and leave it and flowers to die,
Like so many fish caught in a net.
Once was, was once and perhaps again will be
But I doubt it leads anywhere but nowhere
Too Bad!
Like an old song,
You hum the tune now and then,
But forget the words.
The weather has officially turned as cool windy breezes have greeted us in the mornings. Keep up your encouragement of others. Change is coming.
Be a good human.
Wear It Loud: Two Shirts for November
Readers get 10% off anything in the shop with code PORCUPINE10. Shipping is free in the US.
Autopilot Me to 2028
Some of us would like to set the cruise control, close our eyes, and wake up in 2028. A steering wheel with a little AI sparkle on the hub, printed big on the back of a garment-dyed Comfort Colors tee. Political humor for anyone counting the days.
Midterms 2026
Stop. This. Now. Five emojis say what a lot of us are thinking heading into November: a stop sign, a finger pointing at the mess, the pile itself, an alarm clock, and an exclamation point, over a navy ribbon that reads MIDTERMS 2026. No words needed. Everybody gets it.
Be a good human.