For various valid reasons too complicated to cover here (but which I fully recount in my memoir Somewhere Child [Viking Press, 1981]), I’ve never been much of a flag-waver. When I try now to imagine a flag I might want to wave patriotically, I envision one with the whole world emblazoned on it.

Nationalistic (and other) divisions – and their inherent testosterone-driven battles for supremacy and territory – have always baffled and troubled me. Aren’t we all in this together?

Call me an Earth Sign – because I am, a Taurus – but it’s the big, fat, round Planet Earth with its land masses divided only by oceans that brings out the latent-patriot in me. When others in the not-too-distant future are booking their flights into outer space with a view to colonizing it (if I’m still alive then), I’ll wave good-bye, good luck, and bon voyage while gripping my world flag. I’m sticking with the Mother Earth I love.

Nevertheless, enthusiastic expressions of patriotism by proud and peaceful citizens of a country fascinate me, the perennial outsider (and closet anthropologist), wherever on earth I happen to be living.

Take, for example, the week-long celebrations that just ended here in San Miguel de Allende of Mexico’s two-hundred-plus year independence from Spain. There was LOTS of faux gunfire (fireworks), marching bands, trumpets, drums, costumed reenactments, endless festivities, and flags, flags, flags:

San Miguel de Allende is considered the heart (el corazón) of Mexico, and the state of Guanajuato, where San Miguel is, is where their war of independence began. This is where the names of the brave leaders of that fight are remembered in street names, city names, and museums.

All this past week I’ve been in awe of the throngs of happy, healthy, well-dressed, well-fed, well-behaved Mexican people – young people, old people, couples, families — in the central plaza (Jardin) here who’ve come from other parts of Mexico to celebrate and share their love of country and to honor the memory of these historic figures.

How wonderful, I think, admittedly a little enviously, to have such patriotic feelings.

When I think of my own country right now, the supposed “united” United States of America, my dominant feeling is deep concern over its current jagged divisions. “This election,” I read in a quotable Facebook post the other day, “is exposing everything that is wrong, corrupt and broken about America.” And the outcome of this election will have – potentially for worse – ripple effects all over the world for a long time to come.

What can we do between now and election day, I wonder? Hope? Pray? Take a stand? Speak our minds? Share our thoughts? March with a peaceful “Love Our Mother Earth” flag, like the one I’m making now?

And then, of course, VOTE.