For military families, every day is the Fourth of July.

We don't need a national holiday, or a parade, or fireworks, or red-white-and-blue jello salad to be reminded of what this country means, and how it is that the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence are still cherished here after 231 years.

Our families have invested a great deal in keeping those freedoms alive, and there is not a one of us who doesn't tear up when they hear Taps, because to us, Taps is a very real thing.

On September 11, 2001, one of my nephews was assigned as one of the U.S. Army guards of the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery, and his dad, my brother-in-law, was a full-bird colonel at the time, working at the Pentagon.

Before he even knew if his dad was okay (he was), my nephew joined those who helped to pull bodies out of the smoking wreckage that had been a plane, a building, and human beings.

So deeply affected was he by the events of that day, that he suffered panic attacks for more than a year afterward, some so bad he wound up in the emergency room.

I don't ever mention my nephew's name, or his rank, or his unit designation, because he is serving in the Baghdad area as we speak, and I am not only respecting his privacy, but also the opsec rules designed to protect him and those around him.

After September 11, another nephew and my son enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.  As my son put it, "I'm not that comfortable being one of the ones who needs protecting.  I'd rather be one of the protectors."

My son and my other nephew served five combat deployments to the Anbar province with the Marines, and during one period of time, they were both deployed at the same time.

I have another nephew who serves in the U.S. Army Special Forces.  He has done more than one stint in Afghanistan, as did my brother-in-law, after he got his star.  I don't usually talk about these men in any specific way, for the same reason.  My brother-in-law is now retired after more than 30 years in the SF, so I mention him much more frequently now than I did during his time of active service.

And I've often talked about my dad, a retired Master Gunnery Sgt. who demanded that the Marines send him to Vietnam even though he was over 40 and had five kids, and my husband, brother, and another brother-in-law, all of whom served in Vietnam, most in combat capacities.

You simply cannot be surrounded by a family of men and women (as I mentioned before, my sister did a tour in the Air Force some years ago), without sharing a bone-deep love for this nation and for what she stands for.

On September 11th, while horrifying images of the collapsing buildings replayed on TV, and I did not know how my brother-in-law or nephew were doing just then, I set up my ironing board in the middle of the living room floor in front of the television.

I laid our flag across it--oh, so carefully--so that it never touched the floor.

Stripe by stripe, star by star, I pressed that flag, making steam with my tears. And then I hung it proudly out front, even though our home is so isolated in the country that we have no neighbors who would see it.

But after that day, I watched in horror as the leader of this country and his minions hijacked that very real love of country and twisted it into a campaign ad, using it as a weapon of manipulation to bludgeon and bully a reluctant country into actually invading a country that posed no serious threat to our nation at the time.

I saw them use that weapon to beat and berate anyone who disagreed with what they were doing, accusing even the most quiet objectioners as being not just unpatriotic, but TREASONOUS.

I was one of those "treasonous" objectioners.

From the very beginning, I was never fooled by the Cheney Rove Bush dog-and-pony show, and I tried every way I could think of to make those close to me see that, but so many of my family were actually going to war--they HAD to support it, you see.  They had no choice. 

As Sen. Kerry said...WHO WANTS TO DIE FOR A MISTAKE?

So I learned to say nothing, but then I started getting these e-mails and seeing right-wing apologists using smarmy simplistic messages to bombard me into being the kind of patriot who votes red.

Not white and never blue.

I'd hear these honky-tonk patriot-type songs, dripping with star-spangled sentimentality, that said, basically, you are either for us or you are against us.

"AND I'D GLADLY STAND UP!" soars Greenwood's lyrics to I'm Proud to be an American, played at every stock-car race and football game in the country.

And as I sent one beloved Mills family member after another to fight this godforsaken war, bitterness began to curdle within me, and I started to think:

WHAT THE HELL IS STOPPING YOU?

So many of those country singers were young strapping men.  Multi-millionaires by now, from all those patriotic CDs they sold to the manipulated masses.

But not one of them felt strongly enough about that love of country to ACTUALLY STEP UP, raise their right hands, take the oath, and go off to get shot at and blown up every damn day of their lives.

And now, here it is the fourth of July, and here come the patriotic songs and swelling soundtracks to war-montages of soldiers handing out candy to happy Iraqi children, and I cry, too, just like everybody is supposed to.

I cry for the families like the Page's, my son's buddy, Rex's folks, who will never share another fourth with their boy.  He was shot and killed by a sniper on my birthday last year, right in front of my son, just a couple days after my son's Humvee drove over an IED and a week after he lost three more buddies.

I cry for my friend Jamie, who posts comments here as "usmcmom" whose son has been so badly brain-damaged that every single little thing he does to prove the doctors liars makes me cry.

I cry for my sister-in-law, who says her son's voice has "aged ten years" in the two months he's been deployed in Bush's Surge.

I cry for my son, who says that although the fourth of July was always one of his favorite holidays, he now can no longer endure the cacophany of fireworks displays and the large crowds they draw.

Explosions, just a little too close for comfort.

He's discovering some health problems now, related to the roadside bomb he drove over in Iraq his second deployment.

Fireworks are no fun for combat veterans.

I cry for all the families who have been so used and abused by a cynical administration bent on using the United States military as their own political weapon and war-machine, who sends them back over and over and over again to fight the same damn war, who won't let them return home even after the banners have been strung up because they need the warm bodies over there, who won't let them leave the service when their contracts are up because they can't make their recruiting goals, who forces them to spend what time they've got back in the States training for YET ANOTHER DEPLOYMENT, who ignores them when they say that such treatment is breaking their minds, and who kicks them to the curb when their service is over, cutting benefits to save a buck for Bush's Tax Cuts to the Weathy Chickenhawks WHO NEVER SERVED ONE DAMN DAY. 

And I cry for me, because now, when I hear those patriotic songs, I get so angry, so bitter.

I feel so BETRAYED.

I can't even feel patriotic anymore because Bush's Mafiosos ruined it for me by turning patriotic themes into Republican fund-raisers, and war into campaign photo-op advertisements.

It's not just me, either.  I read a moving essay by Bob Geiger, a war veteran himself, over on Huffingtonpost.com, called "No Joy This Fourth of July."

He says:

I'm going to skip the barbeques and just go to work today.  I do this because the state of my country under the reign of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their entire cabal of crooks and non-patriots, leaves me with a feeling so hollow and barren that I simply cannot use drinking a beer, eating a hot dog or watchintg fireworks as a soothing balm.

He quotes the Declaration of Independence, compares Bush to King George III, and concludes:

His administration has also found a way to diminish a great holiday like our Independence Day, to make us feel less like proudly waving our flag and to even cause many, like me, who have worn our country's uniform, to wonder what the hell it was for.

And for that, every American who voted for Bush, should take time this July Fourth to perform a truly patriotic act and be profoundly ashamed.

Or at the very least, embarrassed and rather stupid.

This Fourth of July, to tell you the truth, I don't think very many of my family will be celebrating.  My nephew is at war.  My son is on duty.  Others are pretty much exhausted by yellow-ribbon flag-waving patriotism.

I won't even be putting out the flag this Independence Day.

And for that, I will never forgive King George and his puppetmaster weekend warmongering throne-bearers, who took my patriotism, and stole it from me.