Tomorrow I’ll march at the “No Kings” demonstration in San Francisco. I hope you’ll be at one. There are many, many, many nationwide.
Your GOP neighbors—the ones with the flag decals on their car—consider these demonstrations to be “Hate America” rallies. So do the GOP politicians that the neighbors help elect.
Watch the neighbors, though. They are the ones who are going to turn you in.
I’m 67, and to me, this “you liberals hate America” business is old stuff. Nixon did it, and Reagan, and G.W. Bush. I miss the press being called “nattering nabobs of negativism.” On the other hand, “godless communist” spans all eras, and I’m just as good with that label now as I was then.
Your neighbors are right, you know. Many of us do hate America. We always have.
I’ve hated America since around the time I saw the pictures of people massacred at My Lai. For the record, that was when people started putting flag decals on their cars—because they wanted to show Lieutenant Calley that he was OK with them.
I know people who came back from that war hating America so much they’ve chosen to live their lives overseas.
To me, it rings hollow to say you hate only the bad part of America. Or that there is a good part of America. It rings hollow because the good part is only intentions and aspirations, and when you equivocate like that, what you’re doing is just stuffing the actual historical evil in a bag with those abstract aspirations and calling it a balanced view.
I’m not talking, here, about some abstract “America” and its role in the world, or about what the Declaration of Independence symbolizes. I’m talking about quotidian America, the real, everyday America. What it means to live a society that brutalizes children and animals, disdains empathy and intelligence, posits the individual as sacred—and then values that same individual only as an instrument of production, an object that makes money (or worse, a consumer, an object that spends money). That is the America my friends escaped, and that many of us have thought of escaping.
The America of the people with the flag decals on their cars.
If you want there to someday be some other America, some America where our children could grow up to be full human beings and not soulless producers and consumers, then you’ll have to start from scratch, almost. You’re certainly not alone in your desire. But trying to re-establish our now-wounded and always contingent liberal democracy doesn’t begin to cut it.
A better place to start might be by embracing a healthy hatred for everything that brought us to this juncture, on No Kings Day 2, October 18, 2025. Embrace your hatred for slavery and conquest—for the past that isn’t even past—and your hatred for capitalism, and for the racially exclusive and stratified nation the founders envisioned, and for what resulted from that, which is the only-sometimes-spoken belief in their innate superiority that afflicts white Americans and which defines all aspects of white American culture. The narcissism. The inability to grieve. The stunted and constrained lives we lead.
I suggest you also hate the cops, for this reason: Donald J. Trump ain’t original; he’s just inviting us all to act out the cop view of the world, a view that gins up our fears and then invites us to trade our freedoms for the illusion of protection—protection to be provided by authoritarians. A world view that valorizes brutality and suppression. This is why—take a moment to think about it—local, state, and Federal cops across the country supported Trump and continue to support him, even after they watched their brethren being beaten on January 6, 2021. Cop loyalty (the blue wall) is vaunted, but that loyalty pales in comparison to cop enthusiasm for fascism.
So yeah, hate America, for all the good and true reasons there are. This healthy hatred is only a start, but it’s a necessary start: To hate America and to grieve what it has wrought. From there can begin our journeys toward wholeness, both individual and collective.
