My son loves to draw American flags. He is so proud to be an American. The cynic in me wants to tell him to stop drawing those flags because I don’t even know if we’re one country anymore, and that if he puts those flags up around our house and on our porch (he stuck one in a potted plant on our porch steps), people will think that we are anti-LGBTQ+, anti-women rights, pro-book banning. But, my better half (that being my husband) pointed out that thoughts like that are what keep us divided.

“Everyone should be able to fly an American flag,” my husband said. “No matter who you vote for.”

And he’s right. When did Old Glory become politicized? When did the American flag become an object that symbolized a certain belief system instead of a country? Somewhere in the past decade, our flag - our country’s flag - stopped standing for our country, and started indicating that you were a non-vaccinated Proud Boy.

My son is 8 and doesn’t see it that way. So, we have at least three homemade American flags around our house and one on the porch.

We don’t have any Pride flags around. We have trans sign buttons and posters he made from the school Pride parade, but the Pride flag is not a part of our house’s decor. It’s not on purpose; we just haven’t bought one yet. So, when I walked past a shop on the 4th of July and saw a Pride flag flying next to an American flag, I thought, “That’s awesome. That’s right.”

As divided as we currently are, I am choosing to follow my son’s lead and my husband’s encouragement: we can come together. We are not all extremes. I am choosing to hope that sooner rather than later, politicians will stop trying to tell me what medical treatment I can allow my son to have. I am choosing to hope that sooner rather than later, Judy Blume books will not be banned under the label of ‘pornography.’ And I am choosing to hope that if we just sit down together, under the American flag and the Pride flag, we can discuss our differences and realize that we’re not that different after all.