Patriotism requires accountability
Patriotism is not pretending everything is fine - it is demanding better.
Every Fourth of July, Americans are told a familiar story about freedom.
We get the fanfare: fireworks, flags, everything in red, white, and blue, and predictable speeches about freedom and our nation’s founding ideals. But patriotism requires more than celebrating our values. We must confront how our institutions fall short of those values.
True patriotism has never been about empty gestures. We love our community, and we love our country. We’re fighting for a more perfect future not despite that love but because of it. Love of country requires an honest reckoning.
America is at its best when we all fight for freedom, liberty, and justice.
This country wasn’t built by perfect leaders. America has always been a story of ordinary people forcing powerful, stubborn institutions to change. It’s on us to keep that story alive.
We see it in the survivors who share their stories in the face of harassment and retaliation. It’s in the organizers who keep showing up long after the headlines fade, and a generation flatly refuses to accept corruption, misogyny, and violence.
This is why the fight for accountability matters so deeply right now.
A society where predators are shielded from justice by their title, wealth, or connections is not a democracy.
The reckoning surrounding Jeffrey Epstein didn’t just expose one monstrous man. It pulled back the curtain on a vast network of wealth, influence, and institutional protection that still allows abuse to flourish. It revealed a culture of impunity where powerful people continue to believe they are untouchable, institutions prioritize their own interests over the truth, and a fatigued public is told to “move on” before any real accountability has arrived.
But I am not interested in moving on.
The promise of America was never automatic justice, but that ordinary people possess the power to demand it. That work is unfinished.
So this Fourth of July, I am bypassing empty pageantry. I’m not celebrating the billionaire class, predators who think they’re untouchable, or our elected officials set on rolling back women’s rights.
Instead, I am celebrating the whistleblowers, the survivors, and the organizers, who keep demanding better from this country in the hope it can live up to its promise. That is the America worth celebrating.
And to the institutions and individuals hoping we will grow tired, get distracted, and look away: this story is nowhere near over.
More soon,
Cheyenne
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