Patriotism means telling the truth

American soldier on Veterans Day on April 15, 2024. (Francesco Sgura via Shutterstock)

The United States did not begin as an inheritance. It began as an act of defiance. A group of people with no empire, no certainty, and no guarantee of survival chose self-rule over submission and accepted the cost. 

They were not united by blood or class. They were united by refusal. Refusal to accept permanent hierarchy. Refusal to live beneath authority to which they did not consent. Many of them were religious dissenters, political agitators, and economic outsiders. They were not weak people worried about their comfort, but people dangerous to the systems they left behind. 

People who are rejected by an old order will not build a nation based on blood or ancestry. They must build it on principle, as the Americans founders did. 

Those people joined together and defied the most powerful empire on earth not because victory was assured, but because the alternative was submission. From the very beginning, Americans shared a warrior instinct. They refused to bend and were prepared to move forward without permission.  

That instinct did not fade with independence. It became embedded in the national character. The United States was born stubborn, loud, and unfinished. 

I came to this country when I was 11 years old, and I became a citizen at 17. In between, I was adopted by my American father. To call myself his son, and later to call myself an American, were the greatest honors of my life. 

I did not understand the United States as a concept when I first arrived here. But I did understand that it is a place that demands something of you. Work. Contribution. Responsibility. Belonging is not automatic. It has to be built. 

Citizenship, to me, was never about paperwork. It was about obligation. 

That belief is why I joined the U.S. military during a time of war. I did not believe it was right to claim the privileges of being American while expecting others to fight on my behalf. If I was going to call this country mine, I needed to be willing to defend it myself. Anything less felt dishonest.

Florent Groberg receives the Medal of Honor on Nov. 12, 2015 (White House Archives / Photo by Pete Souza)

As I would learn firsthand, combat removes illusion. Slogans disappear. What remains is trust, discipline, and responsibility to the person next to you. I served in the U.S. Army alongside Americans from every background imaginable. Different races. Different religions. Different politics. None of that mattered when it counted. What mattered was competence, character, and the willingness to move forward together. In those moments, the American idea was not debated. It was lived. 

In just 250 years, the United States has gone from a collection of rebellious colonies to the most powerful nation in the world. By historical standards, 250 years is a blink of any eye. China measures its civilization in thousands of years. Russia claims more than a millennium of statehood. Compared to them, the United States is still young. Still forming.  

And yet, in its short life, America has already helped define how modern democracy operates. Not perfectly. Not without failure. But with clear principles, such as these: Power must answer to the governed. Legitimacy comes from consent. Individuals possess inherent worth not assigned by class, caste, or birth. These ideas did not originate here, but nowhere else have they been tested, challenged, and projected at this scale. 

The United States has often failed to live up to its ideals, painfully so. Slavery, segregation, exclusion, and injustice are not footnotes in U.S. history. They are part of the record. But failure is not fraud. What distinguishes the American experiment is not that it has fallen short, but that it has always incorporated the moral language and institutional capacity to correct itself. 

The distance between the American ideal and American reality is real. It is also essential. The ideal sets the standard. Reality exposes the work. Progress has never come from denying that gap. It has come from confronting it without abandoning the ideal itself. 

From the outside, the United States represents something larger than its borders. People across the world still measure their own freedom against the American experiment. They criticize it. They doubt it. Sometimes they resent it. But they also watch it. When America loses confidence in itself, the consequences extend far beyond its shores. When it steadies itself, it gives others permission to believe that freedom can endure. 

At 250 years old, the greatest threat to the United States is not a foreign adversary. It is internal erosion. Cynicism mistaken for wisdom. Contempt mistaken for critique. The temptation to treat the country as a transaction instead of a responsibility. 

As an immigrant, I never understood the casual way some Americans dismiss their own country. Criticism is necessary, but contempt is corrosive. You cannot sustain an ideal you no longer respect. 

As a veteran, I reject blind loyalty. Patriotism is not silence. It is honest commitment. It is telling the truth because the country is worth the effort of improvement. 

The United States is still young. Still imperfect. Still demanding. And still very much alive.