What does it mean to me to love my country?

I mean to ask a neighbor who has hurt my feelings this week the same question.

He is one of several people in the area who posted signs distributed by the Trump campaign urging people to vote for Donald Trump, and offering this incentive: “make the liberals cry again.”

I don’t want to make my neighbor cry because he is voting for Donald Trump, and I don’t understand why is eager for me to cry and hurt.

I am what Trump would call a liberal, one of those Godless people out to destroy freedom and the American way of life.

What being liberal means to me is that I love my country and am loyal to it.

I believe when people are hungry, we should feed them.  When children need to learn, we should teach them.

When people have no place to sleep, we are obliged to find them shelter. When they are thirsty, we give them water. When they are in despair, we offer them hope.

When fires and storms and catastrophes strike, disasters too big for us to handle, our national government should come and help us. That’s what it means to me. I am not a communist or a socialist, nor do I know anyone who is.

When refugees suffer horribly from war, genocide, and natural disasters, we should open our hearts and country to them, and help them to the best of our ability, as we always have.

I understand and accept that there are different ideas about these goals, and about how to implement them, but I was never taught to hate the people who disagree with me or wish them harm. There is nothing more un-American than that.

Being liberal does not make me an enemy, neither does being a conservative. Not in America.

Donald Trump has assaulted and diminished almost every one of the core ideas of our democracy, and of our country.

He has frightened many millions of the people he has sworn to protect and sacrificed tens of thousands of lives on the altar of his ego and self-interest. Our leaders do not exist to frighten our people, but to inspire and protect them.

Our President has done neither.

He seems to hate our country while professing the greatest love for it.

In many ways, he is a far more threatening figure to our way of life than the dictators and armies we’ve fought in bloody wars, or the Russians or the Chinese.

They attack us from the outside, he attacks us from the inside.

I am grateful my grandparents – who gave thanks to America every day of their lives – did not live to see a President who wanted to jail his opponents, who has threatened and undermined free and fair elections – and who encourages his followers to threaten, insult, troll and hate people like me, and anyone who challenges him.

Trump’s followers feel disrespected and persecuted by the “elites,” the vague but handy people to blame for all of their troubles. But it is not politics or my imagination to see the persecuted become the persecutors, as happens so often in history.

They seek vengeance by doing to others what has been done to them. Perhaps this is human nature.

Many people in America have reason to feel aggrieved – blacks, women, Native Americans, Asians, and yes, millions of Trump supporters.

These mistreated groups of people have long turned to protests, demonstrations, political action, lobbying, marches – even violence – address their wrongs and fight to right them.

But none of them have abandoned our system of government or damaged it as grievously as it is being damaged now.

What does it mean to be a patriot? A patriot is one who loves and supports his or her country. I am a patriot.

My neighbor is, I am sure, a patriot. People who want to bomb and kidnap public officials because they disagree on public policy are not patriots, they are treasonous.

You can’t help America by hating it, or half the people who live in it.

Many of those struggles for justice and equality, and are ongoing. It is a process, we make progress in lurches and leaps.

The goal is to never stop trying. John Lewis understood this, he was a true patriot, unlike the angry white men who turn up in statehouses with assault rifles over their shoulders while our President winks.

Trump and his followers have accused people like me of dishonestly, treason, God-hating, of being radical leftists who promote violence.

He and many of his followers seem to dread confronting the powerful complaints of women, blacks, refugees, and immigrants, they go to great lengths to avoid or vilify them.

Is that a patriotic position? The constitution says we are all equal.

Denying and obstructing that is not patriotic.

He is telling them quite openly: we will not help you, we will not listen to you, if you want your country back, come and join in our new civil war and dare to challenge.

Even the most casual reading of our Constitution knows that is not what a single one of the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Freedom to vote and protest and civility and co-operation in politics are not things Americans are supposed to have to fight for.

Yet so many of us feel that we are now at war, not with foreign invaders, but ourselves. And I have never seen so many people frightened.

We are all citizens, all part of the American family. It is not patriotic to frighten the people in our family.

This idea of making me cry seems to make my neighbor and the people running the Trump campaign happy. He wants to elect a President so that he can hurt me and make me cry.

Frightening people and making them cry is simply another way of dominating and frightening them. Ask any black, women, or gay person.

Ask any jobless and disheartened working-class white man struggling to live in a community decimated by trade wars.

Trump and Trumpism are the first of the aggrieved movements to hate others so openly and systematically. It often seems that the point for the President. White men have this documented habit of confusing being tough with being strong. History shows us it is quite the opposite.

Martin Luther King had good reasons to hate southern whites, but he never blamed them for racism, wished them harm, ridiculed them, punched or kicked them, or tried to destroy their civic and social structures and traditions.

He was one of the toughest people in American history.

Trumpism hasn’t destroyed democracy so much as it is eroding and corroding it, like some acid constantly being thrown into our eyes. Truth is not the truth, mercy is not mercy, corruption is not corruption.

Liberals and true conservatives know we can barely take four more years of President Trump, and it is almost certain we won’t have to. He has awakened the true patriots and they are fighting for their country, left and right together.

Our great cities, the souls of our civilization,  are now considered enemy encampments, our sacred tradition of refuge is in flames, our historic offer of amnesty to the most vulnerable has been obliterated.

Growing parts of our country are in ruins, flooded or burned,  while we bow and scrape to the polluters and deny our most learned citizens.

Immigrants who have been here for years working hard and sending money home are hunted like murderers in hospitals and on farms, supermarkets, and in city streets, tossed into vans, pulled away from their families, and shipped home without their children and families.

The MAGA people are horrifically correct. Their leader has accomplished a lot, and at great cost to our country.

He encourages and pays for my neighbor putting up hurtful and pain signs that hope to cause me pain and harm.

We are called to a new patriotism, a struggle to reassert the values and promise of the founders.

Patriotism has been turned upside down. To be compassionate is to be a traitor, to jail political opponents, and plot to bomb leaders we disagree with is the new patriotism. Never.

What does it mean to me to be an American?

This year has taught me a lot about that. I confess I never gave it nearly as much thought before. I come from a refugee family, many of us fled for their lives to get to America to escape the Nazi’s and before them, the Communists.

Jews have been fleeing to America for centuries now, and very few of them ever had cause to regret it. For them, as for so many others, America was a dream, and a dream fulfilled.

America kept its promises to them, if not yet to everyone else.  I know this is a different story for so many people in this country, but still, it is my story.

When they came, my family encountered bigotry and discrimination like almost everyone does when they come to America. But for the first time in their lives and in the history of my people, they were in a country founded in a swirl of wondrous language about the sanctity of human beings, who were believed to have all been created equal.

Such an idea had never been embraced by any government in the history of the planet. It was revolutionary and thrilling, it inspired much of the world, and changed much of it.

No one in my family had cause to regret being here.  I am aware many Americans were treated differently and feel differently, but here, I can only speak for myself.

The country kept its world.  We were free to speak our minds and not live in fear, for the first time in our history. Many of our neighbors – Italians, Irish, Haitians, Armenians, all felt the same way.

We took our freedom for granted, it was never challenged or belittled. I get frustrated with America, but I will never hate it and claim it is not great.

In my family, we all could vote, educate ourselves, find work, feed ourselves, and find clean and safe places to live.

Most of the people around us had different ideas about many things, but we were never told we were their enemies, or that we should be jailed, or that we should hate and punish people who think differently.

We learned a new lesson in America: treat others as you would like to be treated yourselves.

America was conceived in a cruel and despotic world, the very idea of equality was heresy.

For the first time in history, a country was created with the intention of building a better world.

In many ways, we succeeded. In many ways, we failed. But we have always tried, and sometimes succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of persecuted people.

Democracy is not a quick or system of governing.

Almost everyone in our country has known for centuries that there are enormous racial issues stemming from slavery, discrimination, and persecution. We are just beginning to talk openly about them. We will succeed, promised John Lewis. We must succeed.

The American experiment calls out for faith and patience. It is a system designed to move slowly and carefully.

Donald Trump has neither patience or faith when it comes to understanding our democracy, and so, neither do his followers.

I am a patriot astonished to find us threatening perhaps the worst dangers in our history or my lifetime.

Donald Trump has come to remind me what it means for me to be an American – to do good, to treat my fellow citizens with dignity and respect, to never take my freedom for granted.

And to fight, over and over, for as long as it takes, for equality and freedom and for a kinder and gentler nation.

I think I ought to collect myself and go and talk with my neighbor. I want to tell him that we both have the right to vote for anyone we want and I respect his right to put up signs that reflect his feelings.

I want to treat him with dignity and respect, and I would hope he could do the same for me. I would never knowingly hurt him. My faith and political values do not require to hate others.

I also want him to know that I am a human being, not a label or ideology.  We are both part of a greater family, an idea bigger than both of us, a  noble experiment, a dream that has lit up the world.

And a neighbor.

I’m a person, your neighbor Jon, and he hurt me when he put up that sign.

I will never give up on America, or give in to the cynics or haters.

For all of its stumbles, I believe America is the best idea in the history of the world, and it still is. The fact that we can criticize our leaders and protest their policies is perhaps the greatest testament to the faith of the fathers.

I want to shake my neighbor’s hand if he will let me and tell him that I would never do anything to make him cry or take any pleasure in it if he did.

That’s not why I love America.