I have these cute 4th of July decorations I put our every year.
The last few years I haven’t wanted to.
The small-town girl and the loin cloths
As a small town girl, you can imagine my surprise when I visited Panama at the age of 14 and the people there weren’t dressed in loin cloths and armed with spears.
Clearly something had been missing in my education up to that point, and it made me realize how much I didn’t know about life outside the U.S.
So when I landed at Florida State University in Panama a few years later and needed to choose a major, International Affairs spoke to me.
Although I had been raised on a diet of American exceptionalism like many of my compatriots, it was while studying International Affairs that I began to truly understand what a global force the United States is. I was shocked to learn that the United States had microcolonized the globe with military bases. And as a very young, and very naive black-and-white thinker, this translated in my mind to: “I don’t like the military.”
(Don’t worry, it doesn’t stay that way. I promise.)
Gone were the days of making vanilla cakes topped with strawberries and blueberries to form an American flag. Nope, I knew better. I knew that the United States was guilty of modern imperialism.
I didn’t recognize it then, but this was the first of my struggles with patriotism. My shiny new knowledge inadvertnetly polarized me. It led me to collapse into one side of a polarity.
And there’s a comedic irony to it all, too. The internet I used to research American imperialism? A Defense Department project. The GPS I use every day? Built by the Air Force.
The military I had written off helped create the tools I used to write it off.
Choosing to be complicated
Fast forward a few (okay, many) years, and a friend introduced me to an organization that supports the children of severely wounded and killed in action service members. They were looking for a program director, and I decided to apply.
You might be asking yourself why someone who’s held an anti-military viewpoint would choose to work with the military.
Let me explain.
There was something brewing in my subconscious that wanted to bubble to the surface. I was starting to realize that the feelings I had been holding about the military weren’t totally valid – that there must be more to learn, more nuance to understand. I knew that if I worked closely with the organization and the families it supports, I would open the aperture of my understanding.
I sensed I needed to evolve.
Working with those families has been some of the most rewarding work of my career.
I’ve worked with scholars who have lost their parents, whether it be from cancer caused by burn pit exposure, to suicide, to being killed in action. I’ve worked with scholars who live every day with the symptoms of their parent’s traumatic brain injury. Sometimes symptoms are mild. Other times they deeply affect their parent’s personality, mood, or cognitive abilities. I’ve known spouses and partners who quit their jobs to become full-time caregivers – not what they had envisioned for their marriages. Families who relocated to Bethesda, Maryland so their service member could heal at Walter Reed. Scholars who followed their parents’ footsteps into the military, only to end up injured themselves.
And a disproportionate number of them become nursing students, drawn to the profession after becoming mini-nurses themselves as children, tending to their parents’ wounds and seeing more injuries and hospital walls than any child should.
You cannot hold this work in your hands and stay comfortable in either/or thinking about the military.
The pinwheels stay in the closet
And yet.
The last few years, I’ve felt disappointed in and deeply saddened by my country’s behavior. I didn’t want to celebrate. The pinwheels stayed in the closet.
But those emotions eventually led me full circle: to wanting to reclaim what is good and right about the United States of America. What do I want the red, white, and blue to stand for?
Some answers come easily. I love the freedoms of speech and protest. I love that as a woman, I can vote. That on my street, my neighbors come from all over the world, and we share each others’ unique holidays. The Fourth of July belongs to all of us.
I love our entrepreneurial spirit, and the way we believe we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. If there’s ever a place where ingenuity and spirit can take you far, it’s here.
Getting things right the first time, however, is not America’s greatest strength.
But one of our deepest strengths is that we are correctable.
Our founding documents contain instructions for their own amendment. How brilliant!
The founders didn’t hand us a finished country, they handed us a mechanism for fixing one. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights: every one of those began as dissent. As people saying this is not good enough about a country they refused to give up on.
Which means my disappointment isn’t a betrayal of patriotism.
It’s evidence that I truly do care about this country, about what defines our shared stories and collective identity, what makes “us” us.
Even at a time when it feels like voting rights are being stripped away for many, I trust that the arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends toward justice. I am (perhaps naively) hopeful that we can learn to lead with love instead of fear.
I am choosing hope over despair.
Because the truth of my patriotism is that it’s not binary.
It’s nuanced.
I can disagree with American policies, both foreign and domestic, and deeply support and care for our families who serve.
What is both/and thinking?
Both/and thinking – sometimes called polarity thinking – is the ability to hold two true-but-opposing things at once, rather than collapsing to whichever pole feels “right.”
In this case, we could say the polarity is between loyalty and honest critique, or love and accountability.
Polarity thinking treats these tensions not as problems to solve with a single right answer, but as polarities we can manage over time.
And for the record, not everything requires both/and thinking. Some things are actually either/or choices that require binary thinking.
The problems come when we treat polarities as either/or choices. We end up overindexing on one side until we start suffering from overuse, and then we react by swinging to the other side.
Either/or thinking can be easier, and is more prominent due to schooling and testing. Does 2+2=4 or does 2+2=5? There can only be one right answer!
Either/or thinking feels like clarity. It’s clean. It’s righteous.
And… it’s usually a dead end.
Either/or thinking leads to tension and conflict. It’s where I’m right and you’re wrong. It collapses us into black and white thinking, instead of seeing all the shades of gray in between.
It often seems unpatriotic to question our patriotism, but perhaps the most patriotic thing we can do is to exercise our right to question it and use our voices to shape what it means to us.
Supporting the military doesn’t mean we can never criticize it. And criticizing the military does not mean we don’t support it. These are false dichotomies and gross oversimplifications.
I can criticize the government and still love my country. I can choose to love and celebrate the good parts.
What does both/and thinking look like in leadership?
If you lead people, you live inside tensions like this every day:
Task and relationship. Speed and quality. Candor and humility. Conviction and openness to dissent. Loyalty to the institution and honesty about its flaws.
The pull to collapse into one pole is enormous, because collapsing feels like resolution. And our brains love the certainty it provides. But leaders who pick a side and stay there don’t create momentum – they create whiplash, as the neglected pole eventually demands its due.
The same muscle that lets you love a country and grieve its failures is the muscle that lets you champion a strategy and welcome the person who challenges it.
Tension, held well, is not the enemy of progress. It’s the engine of it.
As my teacher Barry Johnson often says, “there’s wisdom in the resistance.”
My alma mater gets this. Florida State University, the same campus where I first collapsed into either/or thinking, now runs an annual event called Agree to Disagree, where students across the political spectrum are paired up over dinner to talk about why they believe what they believe. Not to win. To explore. To be curious. To understand.
Here’s where the win happens: when you find yourself certain about a person or a position, move toward it with care, not away from it.
Build trust. Create relationships.
Proximity accomplishes what argument never does.
Holding both sides of a polarity is uncomfortable. And that discomfort is a sign you’re doing it right.
This Fourth of July, the decorations are going back up.
Because I care enough about America to celebrate what I want it to stand for.
A note before you go: I just wrote an entire essay arguing that dissent is a form of love – so it would be a little rich of me to only want comments that agree. If your patriotism looks different from mine, if you think I’ve got something wrong, or if you’re holding a tension I didn’t name, I genuinely want to hear it. Disagree with me in the comments. I’ll move toward you with care. That’s the whole point.