Yesterday my girlfriend Susan and I pulled into a Bass Pro Shops. Before that we’d found a little café called Penny’s Place, one of those accidental discoveries that makes a morning, and I was in a good mood. Then we came up the driveway.

There were flags. Not a flag. Not a tasteful row. There were, as far as I could see, well over a thousand small American flags lining both sides of a very long drive, packed into every patch of grass, more of them clustered in front of the doors. My first thought wasn’t political. It was almost logistical: “how long did it take someone to plant all these?” A full shift, probably. Maybe two people, maybe two days. And then the second thought arrived, that I actually said out loud into my phone: what is this? I’m not confused about what country I’m in. This is a lot. This is a little frightening, honestly. I’m almost afraid to go inside.

I posted a short. Fifteen seconds of a bemused guy looking at a wall of flags. And in the caption I wrote something I still stand behind completely: that it isn’t anti-American to criticize how your country is being run, that it might, in fact, be one of the more patriotic things you can do. That something in me recoils at a conspicuous display like that, as if we might forget where we are without the reminder. That a line was being drawn in the sand and I didn’t love where. And I asked a question. How long before we have a loyalty test? How long before a person can be taken off the street? You think it can’t happen here?

Then the comments came, and they answered my question better than I ever could have.

What the comments said

There were over a thousand of them, mostly on Instagram.

People wished me dead. One told me they hoped I’d slip and fall on a flagpole and die. One said it was too bad nobody ran me over. One wanted my address so they could come over and do it themselves. I was called a retard and a libtard more times than I counted. I was called gay, over and over, as though that were the gravest insult available to a human mind. I’m not gay, but apparently being gay makes you unpatriotic. I never mentioned pride, nor was I wearing anything that demonstrated it, but over a hundred people seemed compelled to equate the pride flag to the opposite of the American flag, as if those two pieces of cloth were locked in some cosmic war. I was told I was a friend to, or should go live with, Hispanics, Black people, Asians, Muslims, Atheists, Jews, and Homosexuals, each named as though the naming were itself the wound, each group clearly meant as a category of person beneath a “Real American.” When Black commenters defended me, the N-word appeared. I was told, in dozens of near-identical variations, to leave the country. To get out. That I didn’t belong here even if I was born here.

And more than one man wrote that I had insulted “half of America.”

That’s funny, I never mentioned half of America. I said I was a bit uncomfortable with a wall of flags. However, they instantly translated it into an attack on “a specific half of the population,” because in their minds the flag and the faction are the same object. They couldn’t tell the difference between “this is too many flags” and “I am against these people.” Some added that there would be “a reckoning,” that it would come for me and my family.

I had asked, in the caption, how long before we have a loyalty test. I didn’t have to wait for the answer. It was in the comments. A thousand people examining one man for signs of insufficient devotion, finding him wanting, and moving at once to the sentence they all seemed to know by heart: “You don’t belong here, get out.” That is a loyalty test. It doesn’t need a government to administer it. Your neighbors will do it for free.

This is where you should sit up and take notice. Because if this were only the government, only laws and agencies and the people who run them, I’d honestly be calmer. Institutions can be voted out, sued, reformed, waited out. But this was “The People.” Neighbors. Hundreds of ordinary Americans who saw someone be mildly uneasy about flags and reached, without hesitation, for a slur and a death wish. That’s not a policy problem. That’s the temperature of the room you and I actually live in, and it’s much colder than I understood.

The argument

Here’s what I kept waiting for and never got: one cogent response. One person who engaged the actual claim.

The closest anyone came was some version of “it’s the 250th anniversary, that’s why there are extra flags.” Which isn’t a rebuttal. It explains the quantity while conceding my entire point. I never asked why the flags were there. I said the conspicuous display unsettled me and asked what it signals. “It’s the 250th” answers a question I didn’t ask.

Everything else fell into five categories, and not one of them is an argument.

Relocate the loyalty: “love it or leave it, you’re on American soil.” They asserted the obligation, but never justified it.

Merge the flag with the tribe: “you insulted half of America, no Democrat is a real American.”

Attack the person: bald, old, gay, weak.

Aim sideways and down, at every group lower on their private ladder than themselves, and never once upward, at whoever actually profits from blind, unquestioning loyalty.

Then the response that deserves more than a sentence, because it’s the one that sounds the most serious: “brave men and women died for your freedom, so how dare you.”

I’m not saying a word against the people who served. I’m saying something about who sent them and told them they were fighting for freedom. American soldiers died for my actual freedom, in any direct sense, in the Revolution. Since then, look honestly at the list. They died for oil. For bananas and pineapples and the fruit companies. For the interests of corporations that needed a foreign government friendlier to their balance sheet. The most decorated Marine in the history of the country, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient named Smedley Butler, said this himself in a 1935 book called “War Is a Racket.” He described his own career as being a high-class muscle man for big business, making places safe for the oil companies and the banks to collect their revenue. He named the companies. He named the countries. This is not some fringe pamphlet, it’s a war hero’s confession.

And this wasn’t one bitter Marine. A generation later, in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, the general who commanded the Allied armies in World War II and then served two terms as a Republican president, used his farewell address from the Oval Office to warn the country about what he named the military-industrial complex: the danger of a permanent arms industry acquiring “unwarranted influence” over the government, and “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” He pointed out that the country was by then spending more every year on the military than the total profits of all American corporations combined. Butler said the wars had been fought for private profit. Eisenhower warned that the machine to keep fighting them had become permanent. Two men, a generation apart, both telling you to watch who benefits, because it usually isn’t you.

And if you think that machine stopped running, watch how these decisions get made now. When the talk turns to Venezuela, notice who gets consulted first. The oil companies get a meeting. Congress, the body that is actually supposed to declare a war, finds out alongside the rest of us. It isn’t hard to connect those dots. The men and women were brave. They were also, a great deal of the time, spent on something that had nothing to do with your freedom and everything to do with someone’s margin. Honoring them means telling the truth about who sent them, not repeating the line that got them sent.

I lived through the last big anniversary. In 1976, the bicentennial, we painted our fire hydrants red, white, and blue and left them that way for years, and I thought it was wonderful. I’m telling you, as a witness who was there for the 200th and is here for the 250th, that the mood is different. In ‘76 the feeling was celebration. This time there’s something underneath it, a sorting of who’s allowed to belong and who isn’t, who gets to speak and who should get out. Same flag. Different message.

What we actually owe, and to whom

Do you owe your country something? Yes, but be precise about what and to whom. You use the roads. You drink water that doesn’t poison you. You benefit from courts and clean food and the herd immunity of your neighbors’ vaccines. That’s a cooperative scheme, and reciprocity says if you draw on it you owe something back into it. That obligation is real. But look at where it points: it’s owed to “the scheme and the people in it,” not to a piece of cloth and never to whoever happens to be running things. And this obligation shrinks exactly to the degree the scheme stops cooperating and starts extracting.

Notice what that obligation does “not” include. It doesn’t include agreeing. It doesn’t include silence. “You consented by not leaving” is one of the oldest bad arguments there is. David Hume dismantled it two hundred and fifty years ago, pointing out that telling someone they consent by not emigrating is like telling a man he consents to a ship because he didn’t jump into the sea. You were born here. You chose none of it. The idea that your only vote is the door is not a theory of belonging; it’s a theory of hostages.

Which brings me to the two words for the two things people keep confusing. “Patriotism,” in George Orwell’s sense, is devotion to a particular place and way of life that you love and have no wish to force on anyone. It’s defensive. It loves something. “Nationalism” is the hunger for your nation’s power and prestige, measured against everyone else’s, and it always needs an out-group to define itself against. Patriotism loves. Nationalism ranks. By that line, a wall of a thousand flags and a comment section that reaches for a slur every time someone steps out of line is not patriotism at all. It’s brutal Nationalism, wearing patriotism’s coat.

Here’s the reality. A nation, stripped of mysticism, is a lot like a union, a group of ordinary people who banded together so they couldn’t be picked off one at a time by whoever holds the power and the capital. That’s the tool of a nation benefiting its citizens. But the tool has a failure mode: the “we” gets commodified, pressed into a flag, and quietly turned around. Instead of loyalty running “sideways” between you and the worker across town and the worker across the border, who are all in the same structural boat, it gets rerouted “upward,” so that you come to identify with the powerful few against your own neighbors and against strangers who are, in every way that matters, exactly like you. The flag becomes the instrument that gets you to defend the people who own you, and to hate the people standing next to you, and to feel proud doing both. That’s the oldest trick in the book, and I don’t mean that as a conspiracy. I mean it as something to keep your eyes open about.

Where this leaves me

I’ll be honest with you. Susan and I have been talking about leaving the country for something like a year now. This wasn’t the thing that started it. The mood had already turned well before a thousand strangers wished me dead over a wall of flags. For a while now the air here has felt wrong in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t feel it too, a sense of people being sorted and hunted and told they don’t belong. If it weren’t for our kids, and the hard machinery of shared custody that roots you to a place, I think we might already be gone. What I saw in those thousand comments didn’t start that conversation. It just confirmed everything that had already been making us have it.

But before you abandon ship, there is one thing that’s actually a way out, and it’s the exact thing all that hatred is designed to prevent. The people in my comments and I have far more in common with each other than any of us has with whoever profited from that display and from blind nationalistic loyalty. Their anger got pointed sideways, at me, at Hispanics, at Black people, at anyone they could reach, and never once upward, where it might have done some good. That redirection is not an accident. It is the entire function of the flag when the flag is used this way: to convert people who should be standing together into people screaming at each other, while the ones who benefit stay comfortable and unnamed.

I wish I could offer the assurance that things will just work themselves out, but the truth is we are in big trouble right now. Near where I live, a man who has been a pillar of his community for decades, who built businesses here and raised a family here, was taken off the street by ICE and detained in another state, and no one would tell his family or the elected officials asking after him where he was or why. His crime, as far as anyone can tell, is that he is an immigrant. He was not a stranger. He was a neighbor, a known and settled part of the place. And it didn’t matter. A thousand people in my comments just made very clear they’d cheer the same thing happening to me.

So I’ll only ask you to do the thing I always ask, the thing none of those thousand commenters did: actually Think.

What is a country, really? What are you defending when you defend it? Who is it for? And when you feel that knee-jerk reaction to tell someone they don’t belong here, ask where that violent rejection is aimed, and who it serves, and whether the person on the other end of it might be someone in the same boat as you and facing the same struggles.

Don’t just say “freedom” or “democracy.” Really look at what’s going on. And then tell me what you find.