PATRIOTISM | POLITICS | PSYCHOLOGY

If That Flag Ain't Upside Down, We're Turning Around!

When patriotism becomes a password, we already know what door it's guarding.

Folks I feel like it was just yesterday... I went to the Citgo by my apartment in Griffith IN and I wasn't there to buy gas, I was there to buy an American flag to hang out of my window.

See this was just after 9/11 and at that time, despite being a raging Jesus freak, I was filled with pride because before then, I only heard and read about attacks on our country, so this was my time to "Be the patriot" -

One thing for sure, indoctrination always does its job.

Well that was a lifetime ago, and I have learned a whole bunch of shit about all the things I was... [clears throat] "taught" in school and church about "America The Great" which I now see as an indoctrination to what I'm calling "diverse-a-phobia"

So today while Ambre and I were out running errands and stopping to have lunch and charge up for the drive home, we walked up to a restaurant reached for the handle and my wife says

"Oh wait, flag..."

I look up and there's an American flag right there on the hostess station, and we both recoiled.

We had no confirmation on where they stood politically, but we KNEW where we were at the same time.

So what did the Crofts do? We called in a "fuck that" and about-faced to look for somewhere else to eat.

I'm glad we did because we found an AMAZING Indian restaurant that I have to say was damn-near life changing. The owner was there working alone, and not long after his wife came in with their newborn. I can't explain how enriching it was, it lifted our spirits and we had one of the best Indian fusion meals we've ever had.

It's crazy how bitter-sweet that is isn't it? To have a flag from the place I call home cause me to NOT want to patronize a business. We feel no regret from it whatsoever and will more than likely do it again.

We are serious about fighting fascism, especially at the level of those we can reach. If your small business seems MAGA or MAGA adjacent, it's a no go for us.

Truth has a way of making you... "meet your heroes," which all of us are warned NEVER to do, if you get my drift.

I met mine.

Capital-A America was the hero I bought a flag for that day at the Citgo. The hero I was taught to salute before I was old enough to ask it a single question. And truth did exactly what truth does - it made the introduction. Up close, the hero had a record. Slavery it never fully answered for. A Constitution that counted some of us as three-fifths of a person and took a century and a half to even pretend otherwise. Wars sold as righteous that were never really about righteousness. A flag that gets planted at podiums for people who'd deny half this country their humanity in the same breath they pledge allegiance to it.

You don't un-meet a hero once you've met them.

America wasn't my "hero" anymore. Community and the PEOPLE, which is what America claims to be, are my heroes now. Not this fake ideology of "God and country." Not a symbol I was handed before I could read. The people who show up. The ones who cook you a meal after your own country made you feel unwelcome two doors down. The ones building something real while the myth keeps getting recited over their heads like it still means what it used to mean.

That's the whole arc, Family. You don't lose faith in the place - you lose faith in the story they told you about the place. Then you go looking for what the story was supposed to be describing all along.

Not the flag. Not the fabric. Not the color.

See, it's not that we hate the flag, it's about what it's being used to represent and the exhaustion of trying to keep it "pure." What we clocked wasn't the object - it was the pattern. And patterns are exactly what behavioral science trains you to see once you know how to look for them.

Here's the mechanism, Family, plain and simple: A symbol doesn't carry meaning on its own. It carries whatever meaning gets paired with it, over and over, until the pairing becomes automatic. That's associative learning. That's how a twenty two-year-old walked into a Citgo in Griffith, Indiana and walked out with a flag for his window, certain he was buying pride. And it's how, two decades later, that same flag stapled to a hostess stand can read as a warning instead.

Same object. Different pairing. That's the whole game - and once you can see the game, you can't unsee it.

What I was fed in school and in church wasn't patriotism. It was the training data for diverse-a-phobia - a fear of difference dressed up as love of country, installed early enough that it feels like conviction instead of conditioning. It took me years to unlearn it. It'll take this country a lot longer.

The flag doesn't represent what we were taught.

Fascists have taken it from themselves and turned it into something that I don't want to represent. The flag used to be a shared symbol. Now it's been dragged, repeatedly, into rallies where hate got a permit. It's been waved next to slurs. It's been flown upside down by people who think a stolen election justified a coup, and right-side up by the people who stormed a Capitol to make sure of it. It's been planted outside businesses that won't serve who they don't want to serve. Nobody did that pairing to the flag but the people carrying it.

Not our projection. Not our assumption. Not our overreaction.

Their receipts. Their pattern. Their consistency.

And once a pattern's been run enough times, your brain doesn't need the full replay - it just needs the cue. That's not paranoia. That's pattern recognition doing exactly what it evolved to do. The same wiring that tells you not to touch the stove twice is the wiring that told Ambre, instantly, what a flag at a hostess station in this particular political moment was more likely to mean than not.

Same with faith. So many of us still have our faith, but have pulled back or separated from the religion because of what it's been allowed to represent. Both have been hijacked, and we refuse to lie to ourselves that it hasn't. Same read applies to a cross. Same read applies to a "we will pray for you" sign propped in a window. I'm talking about the cross that's been turned into a battle flag. The one that shows up next to "no mask, no problem" and "boycott the woke agenda." The one that's less about salvation and more about sorting - telling you, before you ever say a word, which side of the room you're supposed to be standing on.

A symbol is not what it claims to be. A symbol is what it has been used to do.

That's the whole thesis. Strip away the flag-waving speeches about heritage and honor, and what you're left with is a simple behavioral fact: symbols get their meaning from repetition, and repetition is a record. You don't have to guess what a symbol stands for when the people carrying it have spent years showing you, loudly, in public, on camera.

So no - we didn't need to sit down, order appetizers, and conduct a focus group on the hostess's politics before we made a decision. We didn't need to give a stranger the benefit of a doubt they hadn't earned. We read the signal the way it was built to be read, and we acted on it the way our nervous systems are built to act.

Trust the read. Trust the pattern. Trust each other.

That instinct led us out one door and into a better one. It'll keep doing that, every time we let it. That's not division, Family. That's just paying attention.

I have resigned to allowing my pride and patriotism to live through my actions and not in that symbol. The symbol has been stolen.

Written by Dr. Leo Croft Behavioral Scientist | Cultural Strategist | Member of the American Psychological Association

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