I disagree. What happened was that since the 1980s (IMO), the right has worked to transform patriotism from “being proud of the country you live in” to “outward display of rapture at every possible opportunity, and if you don’t do so you’re the enemy.”
Branding products with “Patriot” is crass marketing, not patriotism.
ETA: This is better written:
Because there are plenty of beneficial, non-native plants. A thoughtful gardener can enhance the habitats of endangered species while celebrating botanical diversity.
If you want to use the sports analogy, the proper response to moving the goalpost isn’t to walk off the field, it’s to call a flag on the play. In this instance, by vocally asserting a better definition of patriotism, like in the 70’s, when the response became “peace is patriotic.”
The latter two points were about buying American, nationalism, and regionalism, and how many otherwise left-folks buy into hyperlocalism and competitive veneration of their political and bioregions without critical thought. Shopping local puts money back into the community, sure. Buying American puts money back into our slightly larger community. Buying international typically means putting money into various hands that usually aren’t the workers in those countries, their communities, or our communities.
Plenty of non-native plants are beneficial to local ecosystems and aren’t invasive in the sense of spreading anywhere, outcompeting endangered species, or failing to provide resources for local creatures. But there’s a schism between the “native plants only” crowd and the “miracle gro and English gardens” set so deep there’s no room for dialogue.
The previous administration should have made contracts to buy these as we really did need domestic production of N95s to ramp up.
However, N95s are now fairly available. $5 per mask in quantities of 5 is a price I would have happily paid last year for genuine N95s, but not this year.
For about the same price as 5 “patriot” masks you can get 10 3M 8511 valved N95s (NIOSH found that valved N95s work as well or better than surgical masks at source control because surgical masks leak so much, you can still tape over the valves to make them work better at source control). 3M has very efficient filtration media and the 8511s are likely to be much more breathable than the patriot masks.
You can get the very breathable duck bill N95s from Amazon at a bit over $1 per mask in quantities of 50.
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