When I don’t know what to say because I’m in shock at what’s happening in our country, when it would be easier to stay silent than to try to give words to something unnameably unjust, when parts of me want to employ magical thinking, to live in pretend land for just a moment so I can have a bit of fun, sometimes I have to just sit down and write, not with an agenda, but as a calling. July 4 was one of those days this year.

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For me, July 4th arrives like a lover we no longer trust. We remember what we once saw in her—the promise of something radiant and bold, a country birthed in revolution, a dream of liberty lit like a fuse in the dark. But these days, she walks in like a ghost of herself, draped in flags that feel more like veils of shame than banners of belonging.

In Ladera Heights, California, where the jacarandas bloom, their purple petals falling like quiet prayers on the sidewalks, Celina Ramirez, a Guatemalan street vendor selling tacos outside the Home Depot, clung to the jacaranda tree to try to avoid getting carted off by ICE, as captured on video. (Read about Celina here. Feel your heart break as you watch her cling to the jacaranda here.)

This is not the America they told us about in grade school, with lies of American exceptionalism and global empathy. This is not the land of the free. Not when “freedom” is peddled like snake oil to distract from the iron grip of greed. Not when “liberty” has become the velvet mask worn by fascism while it sharpens its claws. Not when a “Big, Beautiful Bill” is signed by manicured hands that have never known hunger—only to strip Medicaid, school lunches, and Section 8 housing from the palms of the poor.

We were told this land was our land. From California to the New York island. But if you’re Black, or brown, or queer, or trans, or poor, or disabled, or undocumented, or addicted, or mentally ill, or simply not male and white and rich enough to matter—does this land still claim you? Or does it surveil you? Profit from you? Forget you?

I watch the American flag fluttering on my neighbor’s porch and feel the acid bloom of ambivalence rise in my chest.

What is the flag now?  A shroud? A sales pitch? A symbol stolen by those who cry tyranny when asked to wear a mask, but cheer as children are put in cages? I want to love my country. I do. But not like this. Not with my eyes closed. Not with my conscience gagged.

Rumi says, “Don’t get lost in your pain. Know that one day your pain will become your cure.” And maybe that is what this heartbreak is. A holy wound. A sacred splitting. An ache that might one day become the medicine that saves us—if we don’t look away. But I don’t want to spiritually bypass the heartbreak I feel.

Because pain, unlistened to, becomes cruelty. And cruelty, normalized, becomes fascism. And fascism, once dressed in the costume of patriotism, becomes a cancer in the body politic.

You can feel it. The slow rot. The creeping horror of complicity. We’re not watching a country evolve. We’re watching one disintegrate.

And yet the fireworks still go off. The parades still march. The barbecues sizzle and the sparklers glow. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry or run.  Do we stay? Or do we leave? And if we leave, are we abandoning those who need us to fight for them, leveraging our privilege to even have that option? Will we be allowed to come back, where are children are in colleges being tested for their obedience? 

That question has become the quiet drumbeat in so many hearts. What does it mean to resist when the water is rising and your house is already half-flooded? Do you build an ark? Or swim for shore? Or anchor yourself deeper and refuse to move?

The temptation to jump ship is real. To expatriate. To become immigrants ourselves. But then I remember Celina and the jacaranda tree. I remember that to leave is a luxury. A kind of privilege born of passports and bank accounts and options. And what about those who can’t leave? The disabled veterans sleeping in parking lots. The families crushed by student loans and systemic racism and generational poverty.

No, we must not abandon this country. Not entirely. Not yet.  We must reclaim it. Root by root. Story by story. Song by song.  Because if we leave the flag to the fascists, they will color it with only one story—theirs.

But the flag is also ours. It carries the ghosts of freedom fighters and bus boycotters and water protectors and stonewall rebels and #MeToo whistleblowers and Standing Rock warriors. It holds the fingerprints of Harriet Tubman and Fred Hampton and Dolores Huerta and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the nameless, ordinary people who risked everything for justice.

The flag is not the problem. The lie is. The lie that patriotism means silence. The lie that dissent is disloyal. The lie that compassion is weakness. The lie that billionaires are heroes and immigrants are thieves.

We are the spell-breakers now.

We are the ones who must remember what the flag once tried to mean. We are the ones who must wrap our arms around the grieving body of this country and say, “You are sick, but you are not beyond healing.”

We must become the new founders. The midwives of a second America—one not born in genocide and slavery, but in accountability, reckoning and repair.

This is not the time for fast talk and easy answers. This is a time for deep soul excavating. For sitting by the fire with the elders. For asking the difficult questions beneath the obvious ones.

What does it mean to belong to a place that no longer sees you? How do we stay tender in a world that rewards cruelty? How do we grieve without going numb?

I don’t have all the answers, but I know this much: We must stop pretending everything is fine. We must name the horror and still hold hands in the dark. We must mourn and protest, whisper and roar. We must create sacred mischief. We must become the ones who see clearly, who love deeply, and who refuse to look away.

It is a form of devotion now—this staying awake.  It is a revolutionary act to still care, to still believe that America can be something better than this grotesque cartoon of empire and egomania.

So I lit a candle on the Fourth of July, not for the bombs bursting in air, but for every soul who ever tried to make this country live up to its promises.

I lit for Celina.

I lit it for the poor and the forgotten.

I lit it for the trans youth denied health care, and for the Black mamas who bury their sons and daughters.

I lit it for truth-tellers and whistleblowers, for the teachers and nurses and social workers who show up every day under systems designed to break them.

I lit it for the ones who refuse to dehumanize even their enemies.

I lit it for those who have given up. Because I have too, sometimes. I know what it is to despair. To check out. To go quiet.

But silence helps only the tyrant.

So I will sing. Even off-key. I will tell the story as truthfully as I can. I will reclaim the word patriot from those who confuse it with domination. I will remember that love of country does not mean love of its sins. And I will walk beside others—perhaps even other writers, artists, songwriters, and activists like you—who are willing to carry both the grief and the vision. Who still believe there is something here worth redeeming. 

Not the fake myth of American exceptionalism, not the lie taught in history class that overwrites the genocide, enslavement, and brutality of our country’s origin, but the living, breathing, struggling, striving people of this country, not the ones who lie, who gaslight, who believe fake news, but the majority who do not want what is unfolding. We the People. You. Me. Us.

Maybe that’s what patriotism really is—not allegiance to power, but to possibility. Not to dominance, but to dignity. Not to the flag as weapon, but as invitation. Let the jacarandas be our banner now—tender, purple, fleeting, resilient. Let the street vendors and the schoolteachers and the abolitionists and the artists and the caretakers and the wounded dreamers be the true fireworks. Let us be the new America.

The one that rises not from conquest, but from connection. The one that can bear to look itself in the eye. The one that burns not with hatred, but with holy fire.

Let us not waste the sacred ache. Let us write a new story in the ashes. Together.

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