In June I wrote one post a day for thirty days, leading up to the Fourth of July. They went out on Facebook, one at a time, with a hashtag. Here they are, gathered by week as I wrote them, so you can read them the way I meant them: as one long argument with myself about what it means to love a country and say so out loud.
June 4: I have to be honest about something
I have to be honest about something, and I am going to start there because I think it is the only way to do this right.
In 2016, I was shocked. Genuinely. I believed that certain things would disqualify a person from the presidency. That there were lines. That enough people would look at what was being said and done and simply say no. I was wrong, and I told myself it was a fluke. Painful and alarming, but a fluke. And I had enough faith in people, in the system, in basic decency, that I did not speak up as loudly as I could have in the years that followed.
I thought it would correct itself. It did not correct itself.
And I have been sitting with the uncomfortable truth that my silence, my optimism, my faith, my assumption that surely people could see what was happening, was not neutral. It was a choice. And choices have consequences.
So for the next 30 days, leading up to July 4th, I am going to post one thing every day. Not a lecture. Not a rant. Just what I actually think, said out loud, because I have learned that staying quiet in the name of keeping the peace is just another way of choosing a side.
I love this country. I am angry at what it is allowing. And I am done being quiet about it.
June 5: When I stopped believing it was a fluke
I have been trying to figure out exactly when I stopped believing that 2016 was a fluke.
I think it was somewhere between the first impeachment and the second one. Between watching the January 6th attack on the Capitol and watching the Senate acquit. Between the moment I thought, surely this is the line, and the moment I realized there was no line, or at least no one willing to hold it.
And yet even then, I convinced myself that 2024 would be the correction. That people would remember. That the distance between 2020 and 2024 was short enough that the memory would hold. It did not hold. Not for enough people.
90 million eligible Americans did not vote in 2024. The margin was 2.3 million. I am not angry at those 90 million people. I understand the exhaustion. The cynicism. The feeling that none of it matters. I had some of those feelings myself.
But I also had a platform, a voice, and the ability to say something. And I mostly did not. That is on me. This series is me doing something about it.
June 6: Three voices across three centuries
Jefferson wrote something I keep coming back to: institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. It is a generous idea. The kind that assumes the people in charge are actually interested in progress.
Roosevelt added a warning: a great democracy must be progressive, or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy. Not a suggestion. A warning from someone who understood what happens when institutions stop moving forward and start sliding back.
And then Dr. King, who earned his clarity through a cost most of us will never be asked to pay: light over darkness, love over hate, a world perspective wider than any tribe or fear or class.
Three voices across three centuries pointing at the same thing. And standing in front of their words, I felt something I was not entirely prepared for. Not pride exactly. More like an obligation. The specific feeling of being handed something extraordinary by people who sacrificed for it, and understanding that it is your turn to carry it.
These places are not museums. They are not tourist attractions. They are instructions left by people who understood something urgent about what democracy requires from the living. From every generation, including the one currently failing the test. Including mine. Including me.
June 7: Fifty-two
Today is my birthday. I am 52.
I am not someone who gets particularly dramatic about birthdays. But 52 feels like an honest age. Old enough to have watched this country through enough cycles to know that things do not fix themselves. Young enough that the choices I make right now still matter in ways I can actually feel.
Today, I've been thinking about what 52 years of watching this country looks like. I was born into the tail end of Vietnam. I grew up through Watergate and its aftermath, through Reagan and Iran-Contra, through the end of the Cold War and the strange optimism of the 90s, through September 11th and what came after, through two financial crises, a pandemic, an insurrection, and everything since.
That is a lot of history to have lived through. And what I keep noticing, on this particular birthday, is how many times I watched something alarming happen and told myself the system would hold. That the institutions were strong enough. That people would see what was happening and say no. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they did not. And the times they did not, when the line got crossed, and the cost stayed manageable, and the next person pushed further, I was often quiet about it in ways I am not proud of.
52 feels like the age where you stop waiting for the right moment to say the things you actually think. Where you understand that the right moment was probably several moments ago, and the only useful response to that is to start now. So, here I am. Starting now. Four days in, 27 to go.
This is my birthday post. Tomorrow we go back to the harder stuff. But today I just wanted to say: I am glad to be here. I am glad this country still feels worth fighting for. And I am genuinely glad there are people reading along who feel the same way. That is enough for a Sunday in June.
June 8: Fifty-eight thousand names
Some places ask you to look at them. And there are places that ask something of you.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the second kind. The voices lower before you consciously decide to lower them. People stop performing. The air changes in a way I cannot fully explain except to say that grief lives there. Not abstractly. Not historically. Presently. 58,000 names. Not a number. Names.
I think about that wall when I hear people use the word “patriotism” as if it were simple. Like it is just pride, flags, and feeling good about where you were born. Standing there, it stops being a feeling. It becomes a debt. A responsibility. A question. The question is: given what this country has cost people, what are we willing to do to make sure it was worth it?
And here is the thing I keep coming back to. Democracy was never automatic. It never held itself up. People maintained every inch of it. Who showed up, who argued, who sacrificed, who refused to let it slide. The names on that wall are not history. They are the evidence. Evidence that this country has always depended on people willing to pay a price to keep it.
I have not always answered that question as well as I could have. I am trying to answer it better now. That is what this is.
June 9: The bridge
Earlier this year, I stood on a bridge on a Saturday morning with thousands of strangers and felt something shift.
I want to tell you what it looked like before I tell you what it meant. Because I think we have gotten too used to seeing protests as footage. A thing that happened somewhere. People on a screen. Easy to scroll past.
This was not footage. This was people. Shoulder to shoulder across the full width of a bridge on a cold March morning, stretching as far as I could see in both directions. Older people with handmade signs. Young parents with kids on their shoulders. Veterans. Teachers. Retired folks who looked like they had never been to a protest in their lives and had decided that today was the day. All of them were there on a Saturday morning when they could have been anywhere else. When they chose to be there anyway.
I had just come back from Washington, D.C., the week before. I had spent days walking through the country's physical symbols. The Capitol. The Archives. The memorials. The Lincoln Memorial at night. All of it was built to hold the biggest ideals this country has ever tried to live up to. And I had felt, walking through those places, a tension I could not quite shake. The beauty of what this country says it is sitting right next to the weight of what it is actually doing right now.
Standing on that bridge, I felt the other half of it. The answer to the tension. What I had seen in DC was the architecture of democracy. What I saw on that bridge was its heartbeat.
The energy was not angry. That's what I want you to understand. It was not the kind of crowd that is looking for a fight. It was the kind of crowd that has decided, quietly and firmly, that enough is enough. There is a difference. Anger burns out. This felt like something that was just getting started.
And the signs. I want to tell you what some of them said because I think they matter more than any news coverage of the event did. Disgusted, not distracted. Tyrants fall when people rise. History does not forgive silence. Radicalized by basic human decency. When cruelty becomes normal, compassion looks radical. Side with love. No human being is illegal. Stop pretending your racism is patriotism.
Every single one of those signs was made by hand. By someone who sat at a kitchen table or a garage workbench and cut cardboard and found a marker and wrote down the thing they most needed to say. That is not performance. That is conviction.
These people were not there because they hate this country. Everyone on that bridge was there because they love it enough to expect better. That thread ran through everything. This was not about tearing something down. It was about refusing to hand it over.
I had been staying home, metaphorically speaking, for too long. Standing on that bridge the week after walking through those memorials, I understood something I had not fully understood before. The buildings hold the aspiration. The people keep it alive. And right now the people part is the one that needs us most. The heartbeat was still there. It just needed people willing to show up and be it.
June 10: One week in
I am not doing this because I have it all figured out. I am doing it because I spent too long assuming someone else would, and that assumption proved expensive.
This week was about honesty. Faith misplaced. Silence chosen. The slow realization that optimism without action is just another way of letting things happen to you.
Next week, I am going to share the documented record. Not opinion. Not spin. What courts have actually ruled. What official findings have confirmed. Things that are verifiable and worth knowing, regardless of where you land politically. Because you cannot respond clearly to something you do not understand clearly. And right now, clarity is the most patriotic thing I can offer.
Week Two is next.
— Patrick