What is a Patriot

I grew up believing patriotism was simple. A hand on a chest. A flag. A pride in belonging to something larger than yourself that didn't require too much examination. I have since learned that the things that don't require examination are usually the things most worth examining.

So. What is a patriot today.

This is not a rhetorical question. It's an actual one, sitting in my chest, asked in good faith in a country where the word has been picked up and used as a weapon so many times that it has started to mean almost nothing except allegiance to whoever is saying it. Wave the flag the right way and you're a patriot. Wave it differently and you're an enemy. The flag is the same flag.

I think about the founders often, and I try to do it honestly, which means holding two things at once. They were flawed in ways that were not incidental — they held people in bondage while writing about freedom, and that contradiction is not a footnote, it is a wound that has never fully closed. And they were also people who looked at what they had inherited and said: no. Something better. And then they tried to build it, knowing they would get it wrong, writing in the revision mechanism. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, imperfectly and sometimes brutally, we have been in that argument. The argument is the thing.

What I keep coming back to is the neighbor. Not the abstract neighbor. The actual one. The person who lives three houses down whose yard sign last November made something tighten in my chest. The one whose truck I see in the driveway, whose kids I have watched grow up, who brought food when someone on the block got sick.

I want to be careful here, because the honest version of this essay has to hold something uncomfortable: some neighbors are actually bad. This is true. There are people on quiet streets who have done terrible things — to children, to partners, to people who trusted them. Evil is not a metaphor. It lives in ordinary houses on ordinary blocks and it does not announce itself with a sign in the yard.

But that reality is not the same as the story we have been handed about whole categories of neighbors. One is a fact about a person. The other is a template applied to everyone who looks or votes or prays a certain way, so that we stop seeing the person and start seeing the category. The template is what I am pushing back on. Not the facts, never the facts, but the reach of the template beyond what the facts actually support.

What I notice, when I stop reading the template and look at the actual person, is that most of what drives us is not that different. The desire to keep our families safe. To live with some dignity. To not be lied to by people with power over us. To matter to someone nearby. None of that is partisan.

Patriotism, to me, is refusing to stop looking for that core. Not because it fixes everything. Not because it erases the harm that real people cause. But because the alternative — accepting that the country is simply two camps of enemies — is a story that serves no one except the people who need us divided to stay in power.

Are you brave enough to go to war for your beliefs? I think the braver question is whether you can sit down with the neighbor, the real one, and stay in the room long enough to find what you share. That ground exists. It is less exciting than the fight. But it is where the country actually lives.

XOXO,