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Just One Honest Citizen
There is a population growing in this country that the country has not found a good name for, because the country does not want to look at it directly. These are not radicals. They do not burn anything. They pay their taxes, help a friend move a couch, look for moments of joy. What they will not do, quietly and without apology, is feel warmth in their chest when an American flag goes by.
These are good people. Kind people, often the most creative and intelligent in the room. And the thing they have set aside, the thing so many others still clutch like a life preserver, is pride in the word American.
Somebody is going to call that ingratitude (or worse). It is not. It is honesty, arrived at the way they were taught to arrive at it, and then held against them for where the honesty led.
Me: Well, things are clearly bad right now, but surely you don’t abhor the country as a whole?
Them: [silence]
Me: Do you?
Them: Well, it’s pretty awful.
That was the whole exchange. No shouting. No tears. Just enough to make clear the answer was obvious, and a sentence short enough to make clear no permission was being requested to hold it.
I will call this person Diogenes. I am not describing the philosopher. I am talking about a living person I love and respect and admire. The historical Diogenes carried a lantern through the streets of Athens in broad daylight, telling anyone who asked that he was looking for an honest man. He also refused the label of Athenian, or Corinthian, or citizen of any city, and called himself instead a citizen of the world, on the theory that loyalty to a patch of ground was a smaller thing than loyalty to what was true. He was not wrong about much. The person I am writing about is not wrong now.
I will not tell you whether Diogenes is young or old, or say which pronoun belongs to them, and that omission is deliberate rather than coy. The specifics would let you file this away as one generation’s complaint about another, or one kind of person’s problems about a different kind of person. It is neither. It is a stance available to anyone who has looked squarely at the record and stopped flinching from what it says.
Diogenes does not carry pride in being American. That absence is not a character flaw or moral failure. Nobody takes pride in having simply never driven drunk: It isn’t an achievement, and it isn’t a grievance either. It is the ordinary condition of not having done something harmful, and it requires no daily maintenance, no performance, no explanation. It only becomes a subject at all because other people keep expecting pride and getting indifference instead, and cannot quite let that go.
I understand where that stance came from, because I have walked the same road myself. Not to the exact coordinates as Diogenes. But close enough to recognize the terrain in the beam of the lantern.
Here is where the predictable answer arrives, usually from someone who has never once been asked to defend their own attachment to a flag: then leave. That’s meant to end the conversation, and ironically it succeeds only because it was never actually a rebuttal. It assumes the argument is about which country deserves loyalty, when the argument was never about that at all. Diogenes is not shopping for a better patch of ground. Diogenes has stopped believing that any patch of ground is owed the kind of loyalty the question presumes.
A person who has genuinely thought it through would be, by all evidence, roughly as decent a human being if the accident of birth had landed them in Lima, or Minsk, or Kyoto. Goodness or maliciousness are not traits born of a country. Angels and devils are within every border.
This is the part the Love It Or Leave It Crowd cannot process, because it removes their leverage entirely. Shame is a tool that works on people who have staked something on the answer, who need the label to hold up in order to feel whole. Diogenes staked nothing on it. Nationality was assigned at birth, the way a hospital assigns a wristband, and nobody has ever had to defend the fact that they were born rather than having chosen to be. You cannot humiliate a person to celebrate your nationalism, especially once they have already told you that the label was handed to them rather than earned.
Start with the ground the country was built on, and who was standing on it first. The dispossession of Native nations was not a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. It was a policy, executed over centuries, through massacre, forced removal, broken treaty, and the deliberate destruction of the means by which whole peoples fed and governed themselves. The Trail of Tears was not a natural disaster. It was a decision, signed by a president, carried out by soldiers, largely accepted (as well as outright celebrated) by everyday citizens.
Add the economy that financed the country’s early growth. Slavery was not a regional embarrassment tolerated by an otherwise virtuous nation. It was the engine. Cotton grown by enslaved labor made fortunes in Boston and Liverpool as surely as in Charleston. The Constitution counted human beings as three-fifths of a person not by accident but by negotiation, because the alternative was less wealth for the “whole” persons.
Include what happened to the people who tried to organize against the owners of capital once slavery ended and industrial labor took its place. Strikers at Homestead were shot by private security forces. Miners at Ludlow were burned out of their tent colony by the Colorado National Guard, women and children included. The eight-hour day, the weekend, the ban on child labor in factories: none of it was granted. All of it was extracted, at a cost measured in bodies.
Add the empire the country built once it ran out of continent. The Philippine-American War killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in a war fought explicitly to deny them the independence they had already declared. It is barely taught, because it complicates the story of a republic that insists it does not do empire.
The twentieth century brought the same appetite back in new uniforms. Vietnam. The coups engineered in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, each one arranged because an elected government had the wrong ideas about who should control the resources sitting under its own soil. The twenty-first century inherited the appetite and simply changed the euphemisms and uniforms.
The country that did all of the above is also the country that wrote, however hypocritically at the time, the idea that all men are created equal into its founding document, and then spent two and a half centuries being dragged, kicking and often violently resisting, toward actually meaning it.
Abolition happened here, eventually, at the cost of the bloodiest war in the country’s history. Women got the vote here, eventually, after decades of being jailed and force-fed for the demand. The labor protections extracted at Homestead and Ludlow became law…eventually. The civil rights movement broke Jim Crow’s back through discipline, organization, and unbearable courage, and it did so partly by holding the country to the standard it had written for itself and never met.
A nation that contains both the crime and the movement that fought the crime is not the same as a nation that only contains the crime.
That argument is not nothing. I have made it myself, to Diogenes and to others. It has a flaw, and the flaw is timing. The correction always arrives too late, extracted rather than offered, and it is always followed by a new group of people rediscovering how much appetite for cruelty the system still has once the spotlight moves elsewhere. Diogenes has spent the whole of an attentive life watching that appetite operate in real time, amplified and live-streamed, with the people running it rewarded rather than punished. Asking someone to weigh two and a half centuries of eventual correction against the years they have personally watched is asking them to be patient on someone else’s timeline, one they never signed up for and had no say in setting.
I do not hate my country. But there are several things I do hate.
I hate that the loudest people right now treat cruelty as a personality trait and reward as a birthright. I hate that they mistake contempt for the vulnerable as a form of strength, and mistake anyone who points that out as an enemy to be dismissed rather than a citizen to be answered.
I hate that a country founded on the claim that power should answer to the people has produced, generation after generation, a ruling class that treats the people as an obstacle to be managed, and then acts baffled when the managed stop volunteering their pride.
I hate most of all that this country has made someone I love and respect feel ashamed of a birthright they never asked for and cannot return. They did not choose to be born here any more than they chose the name on their birth certificate. What they have chosen, with more clarity than most people manage, is to stop performing a gratitude they do not feel, and to hold their actual citizenship where it has always really lived: with the species, not the subdivision.
Being a citizen of the world was never the consolation prize for failing to love a country properly. It is the older and larger claim, and the America First gang only sounds confident because they have never had to defend it against someone who has already thought it through and moved on.
The other Diogenes carried a lantern through Athens looking for one honest man and, as far as the record shows, never found one. Diogenes kept walking anyway. That is not despair. That is what is left once someone stops asking to be forgiven for not loving a flag, and simply gets on with being decent to whoever is standing in front of them, wherever that happens to be. Is there really another form of citizenship that surpasses that?