The Most American Thing About the Fourth Is Being Disappointed.

by Devon Wellington, MVP candidate for Indiana State Representative district 29

My husband loves his baseball team. When we started dating, I went to the games with him, sure, but I didn't really care whether they won or lost. I was happy when he was happy, and that was about the extent of it.

Then somewhere along the way I started paying attention. I learned the players and the manager; noticed when a player changed their walkout song and the way a whole season has a shape to it if you watch long enough. And the first time I saw a starter carry a no-hitter into the late innings, I realized I was holding my breath. Standing up. Yelling at the screen like I had money on it. A couple years after that, the team lost in extra innings in the playoffs, after building toward it for what felt like forever, and I was genuinely wrecked. Staring dumbfounded at the TV and talking about it the next day kind of wrecked.

I had sat through a hundred games without feeling much of anything. And nothing about the game had changed, it’s just that I had started to actually care.

I bring this up because of how I feel on the Fourth of July.

For the last several years, somewhere underneath the cookouts and the flags going up and down my street, I have felt a knot in my stomach. A kind of dread I can’t ignore that asks: how am I supposed to celebrate this country when I'm so frightened of where it's heading?

As the woman in the stands who didn’t really care, I know I’m feeling disappointment and dread now because I’m invested. You don't lose sleep over something you're indifferent to. I love our country and its promise, and so I feel both dread and love. It’s as easy and as complicated as that.

For a long time, although more intensely in the last several years, our politics have turned the country into one big stadium with two sides in it. Red and blue. You pick a jersey, and then you spend most of your energy rooting against the people in the other one. We have gotten so good at being against the other team that a good number of us have quietly stopped being for much of anything.

Being a die-hard for your party is not the same thing as loving your country. One is about beating the other team. The other is about the promise itself: a real land with real people, realizing that we either all win, or all lose.

Frederick Douglass understood that, and with less reason to than almost anyone. He was asked to give a Fourth of July speech in 1852, and the crowd was expecting a celebration. Instead, his oration was an indictment. "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" he asked. He called the country's liberty an unholy license and its greatness a swelling vanity, and he was right to.

But he didn't walk away. After he had laid the whole hypocrisy bare, he said, "I do not despair of this country." He stayed. He was for the country even while he was furious at it, even when it had handed him every reason in the world to be done with it. The anger and the hope came from the same place.The grief Douglass was describing is not mine to borrow. I'm a white woman, and dressing up my own political disappointment in the suffering of enslaved people would be its own kind of theft. But the posture he models, the staying, the refusing to despair; his example can be an apprenticeship for us all. He forged redemptive patriotism out of his fury. And he’s in the good company of our country’s heroes whose names we revere because they were disappointed in this country and chose to do the inconvenient, scary, often unpopular thing: Ida B. Wells, Frances Perkins, John Lewis, Dalip Singh Saund. They all engaged in the exhausting work of dragging the country toward its foundational promise because of a deep belief in it.

So many of us are for the land we love, which is exactly why we can't keep quiet about the way it's being run right now. This administration is treating the country, and anyone who dares to express disappointment in their actions, like the other team to be beaten. And I'm not willing to call that patriotism just because it waves the same flag I do. They do not get to unilaterally claim this country as theirs and only theirs, no matter how loudly they yell. Loving a county means you get to be furious when it goes against the very ethos of its founding. There is nothing disloyal in that. If anything it's the most invested a person can be.

We have every right to celebrate our stake in this country. Sometimes celebration looks like parades and fireworks. Other times it looks like protesting and demanding accountability. So celebrate. Read the Declaration again, and think about the one promise in it you're uniquely positioned to help keep, in your home, your neighborhood, your town. Go to the one local meeting you've been telling yourself you're too tired for. Make sure a neighbor is registered to vote. Remember that somewhere today, at a courthouse, a few hundred people who weren't born here are raising their right hands and choosing to become citizens anyway, eyes open, with more faith in this country's promise than most of us can manage on most days.

This year, instead of worrying about the flag on my porch being read as an endorsement of who's in charge, I'm letting it be my own declaration; a stake in the ground that says this land is mine too, and I'm not leaving.

The fireworks will go gray and fall back into the dark, the way they do. And the next morning we'll get back to the work that loving our country requires: a hard look hard at what it's become, and a commitment to turn it back towards its potential. I would rather be wrecked by this country than indifferent to it. So I'm going to keep being for it. Out loud. For the better version we can still build, the one we were promised; the one that was, in the beginning and the end, made for you and for me.