Summer came and went, and autumn glided in, soft and quiet like sunset. The leaves on the oaks turned neon yellow and cherry red, and then began to float down and away. Given the timing this year, it was almost as though the trees were made of American flags instead of bare twigs and branches; the more leaves fell, the more I noticed the flags.

Everywhere. I had come to take it for granted that I only saw the flags of my country by the courthouse and the nearby middle school. Every time I ventured out this fall, there were more of them, the previously-ignored symbol suddenly a commodity.

It was the bumper sticker to have. Flag ties, tie pins, earrings, shirts. What was it about eagles and the phrase "United We Stand" that made me feel alienated instead of united?

Perhaps it was my teenage bemusement and disdain for the cultural gimmickry that came to be associated with the 'Gulf War'—how fervent patriotism faded first into cracking bumper stickers and quaintly-patriotic shirts that started showing up in the fifty-cent boxes at flea markets.

Patriotism, like MTV's latest and greatest video, had been simply the current fad. When the need faded, the visible reminders faded.

One of the first things I did after receiving my bachelor's in 1998 was to take a razor blade to the window of my car. I scraped off the years of university parking stickers with a dual feeling of relief and revulsion—time to get rid of this relic from my past. I wondered if the fine, upstanding American adults with their faded bumper stickers commemorating a not-war felt the same way when they took razor blades to their own vehicles.

Over the past few months I've watched with equal amounts horror and fascination as the area I lived in turned from general apathy to fervent patriotism. What could possibly be more middle-American than a mother driving her kids around in a SUV plastered with stickered and magnetic flags? United We Stand, yes, but for what? Rampant consumerism?

There's something wickedly and deliciously ironic about a gas-guzzling SUV, its very lifeblood emerging from Middle Eastern pipelines, displaying stickers (undoubtedly made in China) proclaiming our unity against …. a certain batch of Middle Easterners.

I applaud these people for their patriotism. I hope it is genuine. I hope they teach their children to love the land of their birth, but teach them that love can't be blind, can't be all-encompassing. There is nothing more insidiously damaging than to teach generations of children to believe the phrase "My country, right or wrong!"

Remember the declension: We spread patriotism; they spread propaganda.

I just find myself wondering how long it will take before the flag pins are no longer sold from the impulse-buy bin at checkouts, the stickers are scraped away, the t-shirts sold at flea markets. Until the mumbling mass of Americana, more interested in their own lives than the lives of the rest of the world, decides to collectively shrug their shoulders and get back to their regularly scheduled lives.

I expect the leaves will be back first.