What does it mean to be an American?

Tonight at 5:55 p.m., President Donald Trump shared on the state propaganda site, Trash Social, “Make America Great Again!!!”

And if there’s one thing the president and I can agree on, it’s that we should be making America great again. But here’s the truth: he’s had four years in his first term and ten months into his second, and he’s still shouting the same slogan because he hasn’t made America great. He just keeps making it worse.

I keep thinking back to his final days in office, when he instigated an insurrection that left people dead, police officers tased and beaten, and members of Congress fearing for their lives as a mob stormed the Capitol, that sacred building that belongs to all of us. And I can’t stop thinking about how any percentage of Americans could have watched that, could have lived through that, and still voted for him.

Because pretending not to see it doesn’t make it go away. It just makes us complicit. I used to tell myself that most people didn’t really mean the hate they spread. But now I think they do. And that realization hurts more than I can say.

And when looking back historically, every era has shown us that ordinary people become monsters not through some sudden act of evil but through small and large choices, the jokes they excuse, the silence they keep, the neighbors they stop seeing as human, the evil they vote into office. And we’re watching it happen again, right here, right now.

When I think about history, I ask myself, would I have hidden Anne Frank? I want to believe I would have. I want to believe I would have joined the Underground Railroad, or spoken out during Japanese internment, or marched for civil rights even if it cost me everything. I want to believe I would have chosen humanity over comfort.

And then I look around today, and I see the same moral test, just dressed in different clothes. Because rounding up people based on how they look is wrong. Denying due process is wrong. Bombing fishermen in international waters without proof, trial, or conviction is wrong. Taking food from the hungry and healthcare from the sick is wrong.

And it makes me ask, not as a slogan but as a serious question: What does it mean to be American? What would truly make America great again?

Because none of this is it.

Being American was never supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be a promise, fragile, imperfect, and worth fighting for.

We were born from rebellion, from people who decided that power should serve the people, not rule them. But somewhere along the way, we confused freedom with comfort. We forgot that liberty isn’t a gift. It’s a responsibility.

Even at our beginning, we were both the Declaration and the whip, freedom and enslavement, promise and betrayal. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while owning hundreds of people. That contradiction has always been our burden, and our call to do better.

Being American means wrestling with contradiction. It means loving a country that doesn’t always love you back. It means believing in ideals written by men who didn’t always live them. It means holding both the pain and the hope at once, knowing we have never fully been who we said we were, but refusing to stop trying.

And right now, that promise is under attack. I saw a video today of Trump hosting his lavish parties at Mar-a-Lago: ice sculptures glittering under the stars, seafood piled higher than most families will eat in a month, dancers performing as if for royalty. These are the parties of kings, not public servants. While Americans skip meals and parents ration groceries because their SNAP payments were stopped, the president is throwing feasts for the wealthy. He’s turned the people’s pain into his profit, getting richer off the office he swore to serve. He parties like a monarch and sleeps through his day job while the country he leads breaks apart beneath him. And I can’t imagine any of our founding fathers believed this was what it meant to be American, that we would one day have a would-be monarch as our ruler.

And some will say that freedom is the defining principle of what it means to be American. But if that’s true, then why are the same people who scream about freedom the ones working so hard to take it away? They block voting rights, strip aid from the poor, and fixate on policing transgender people’s bodies while demonizing the LGBTQIA+ community. They fight to control women instead of protecting them. They defend the powerful while ignoring the victims of trafficking and abuse. They worship one man and excuse the inexcusable every time he does it. They call cruelty strength and corruption patriotism. None of this sounds like America either.

And every time America does take a step toward equality, there’s a backlash. After emancipation came Jim Crow. After civil rights came voter suppression. After progress for women and LGBTQ people came new waves of hate laws. The pattern isn’t new, but neither is our resistance.

Real patriotism doesn’t mean worshiping the past. It means learning from it, from the genocide, the slavery, the internment camps, the discrimination, and choosing to build something truer from the rubble. To honor and remember, and to vow to never let it happen again.

In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt told the nation that true freedom meant four things: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Those are still the freedoms worth fighting for. Everything else is distraction.

Abraham Lincoln reminded us that the work of freedom is never finished. He called on a wounded nation to dedicate itself to the unfinished work of democracy. More than a century later, that work is still unfinished, and it’s ours now.

Being American means showing up even when your country loses its way. It means speaking up when power demands silence. It means voting when they try to stop you, marching when it feels pointless, teaching your children the truth even when their textbooks won’t.

I used to think being American meant safety. I believed progress was inevitable. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I think being American means fighting for what you love, even after it’s broken your heart.

Because love is the hardest form of patriotism. Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” He didn’t ask because he hated America. He asked because he loved its promise enough to expose its lies. That is what moral patriotism looks like.

Being American means you don’t walk away from the fire. You walk into it, carrying water for someone else.

It means belonging to a nation that has broken its own heart a thousand times and still gets back up. Every movement for justice, from Selma to Stonewall, from Seneca Falls to Standing Rock, has been a declaration of what it really means to live free. When John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he carried America on his shoulders, not the perfect one, but the possible one. Every march since has been a continuation of that bridge, step by step, toward the country we were promised.

The fight for this country has always been led by the people, the women who chained themselves to the White House gates, the workers who risked their lives for fair wages, the veterans who came home and demanded equality, the immigrants who built cities brick by brick. They’re the reason the American story keeps moving forward.

Because being American isn’t about bloodlines or borders. It’s about belief. The belief that we can build something better together. That every child, every voice, every vote matters. That freedom doesn’t belong to one party or one race or one religion. It belongs to all of us, or it isn’t freedom at all.

When I say I’m American, I don’t mean I’m proud of everything this country has done. I mean I’m proud of the people who keep trying to make it live up to its promise. The teachers rewriting history to reflect a more honest and fair account of what actually happened. The journalists telling the truth even when it costs them their jobs. The parents raising their children to question power. The citizens who keep showing up, again and again, even when it feels hopeless.

That’s what being American really is: the stubborn refusal to stop caring. The belief that this experiment is still worth saving.

Because America is not a flag. It’s not a man. It’s not a building in Washington. It’s us. Every one of us.

I remember back when I was writing about travel, how proud I was to say I was American wherever I went. I welcomed the harder conversations that came with it, the ones about our imperfections and contradictions. I had countless talks with people in other countries about the good and the bad of who we are, and yet, even then, they would often smile and say the same thing: America is the land of opportunity. The land of the free. The dream for so many.

Because even though we were a constant work in progress and had serious problems, there was still that spark, that belief that when you come to America, anything is possible. That’s what it means to be American. Not to say we are the greatest, but to keep proving we can be better.

And maybe that’s the truth at the heart of it all. To be American means we will never be fully where we want to be, but we will never stop trying to get there.

We’re not done yet. We never were. Because being American means the work is never finished. Every generation has to decide again what kind of country we want to be, and who we’re willing to stand up for when it matters most. The story of America isn’t written in monuments or headlines. It’s written in the choices we make when no one is watching.

So we keep doing the work. We keep standing up for one another. We keep believing that even in its brokenness, this country still holds something worth saving.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather