Accidental Patriot

When I was younger I didn't understand patriotism.

It felt contrived and forced, a way to get people to blindly accept the things that a faceless government chose to do in the people's "best interests". Even though I've always voted since I turned 18 in 1999, I got a bit caught up in my generation's idea that our votes don't matter. It was like a seed that lay dormant for decades, waiting for the just-right climate to sprout: and that climate wound up being the 2016 Presidential Primaries.
Whether or not my thoughts on patriotism and the power of votes were correct at the time, they seem to have become correct. And suddenly I'm not willing to simply contemplate or accept either of them.
I'm angry, beyond angry, that the men and women of this country, in their own way and their own time, fought, died, were ridiculed, arrested, ostracized, and forced to wait too long for our freedom to vote, our RIGHT TO A VOICE spoken on a ballot and heard by the government. Because other than civil uprisings, voting was the original act of protest where the PEOPLE DECIDE and the GOVERNMENT OBEYS, serves, carries out the wishes of the people. It is the American pact.
This pact has been broken.
I'm not angry for myself or my own situation. I was able to vote without issue.

I'm angry for the 70 year old woman in Ulster County, NY, who was turned away from the polls without being offered an affidavit ballot. She'd been on the Democrat rolls her whole life.

I'm angry for the 67 year old veteran in Niagara County, NY, whose affidavit ballot still hasn't been counted. He was a lifelong Republican whose registration was changed to "O" for other: with "Conservative" written in by someone other than himself.

I'm angry for the 90 year old immigrant couple in New York County, NY, who became citizens before I was born and never missed an election. They weren't offered affidavits and are too infirm to have gone through the process of a court order to vote.

I'm angry for the people just like them, and nothing like them, in AZ, DE, RI, CT, PA, and who knows how many other states whose right to vote has been stolen from them.

I'm angry for the people who died or were injured in body and soul bringing democracy to other countries and defending the democracy here at home for the last 241 years whose deaths and injuries have been insulted by this sham of an election.

I'm angry for the suffragists who gave ME the right to vote and whose daughters and granddaughters have taken a 100-year step backwards this election.

I'm angry for the black Americans who were insulted and assaulted and killed for exercising their hard-won and hard-kept right to vote in my own parents' lifetime.

I'm angry for every silenced voice, every wasted trip to the polls, every uncast ballot, every uncounted ballot, every 18 year old whose first voting experience taught them that their vote truly doesn't matter and who may never vote again.

I'm beginning to understand patriotism and why so many people have sacrificed so much for nothing but an idea. That idea is that our pride comes from a hard-won democratic process. Our ability to speak, to hold our government accountable to the people it serves, was and is still worth sacrifice.
The enemy to democracy is no longer "out there" somewhere but within.
Patriotism, as I understand it now, is not allegiance to a government but to one another, to individual people in individual states in individual counties. In those counties are towns with homes and actual human beings who owe far more to one another -- for the sacrifices already made and the ones which may become necessary in the not-so-distant future -- than to any agency, candidate, or political party making up that government.

In silencing any one voice, ignoring any one vote, our government insults every single one of us: and it is to one another that we owe our allegiance.