I have never felt so mother fucking patriotic in my life

I was raised your typical, conservative, Midwestern, suburban white kid in the 1980s. My Christian family worshiped Ronald Regan and Bob Dole and thought the ACLU was a godless, communist organization. In our family, the Kennedy name was mud. The threat of nuclear annihilation hung around in the air to remind us that evil was real and the U.S. was a shining beacon of democracy. We believed…