By JOHN C. SPRUILL
For 250 years, the great forge of American patriotism has been shared hardship. The Revolution created this country. T he Civil War redefined it. The World Wars globalized it. And for one brief, painful moment in September of 2001, a terror ist attack reminded us what we still held in common.
Each of those events did the same thing: they made Americans look up from their own quarrels and see each other again. The neighbor you disagreed with at the feed store was suddenly the man standing next to you at the recruiting office or holding a flag at the same vigil. Hardship clarified who we were because it made the stakes unmistakable. You knew which side you were on because you knew what was worth defending.
We have now gone roughly a generation without that kind of clarifying pressure, and it shows. The closest thing we had to a common test was COVID, and instead of uniting us, it split us further because the en emy was invisible, the response was contested, and the political class turned it into another front in the culture war almost before the first case was confirmed.
A country that cannot unite against a pandemic has lost something our grandparents took for granted.
A Fair Question, Honestly Asked
It is fair to wonder whether this generation could endure what earlier generations endured. I have wondered about it myself.
The men who signed the Declaration pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred hon or, knowing full well what the British did to traitors. The men who stormed Normandy were barely out of high school. The men who rebuilt after the Civil War buried their brothers and went back to work.
Would we do the same?
Honestly, we do not know. And that uncertainty is itself the problem.
Some of what built the resilience of earlier generations is genuinely gone. Children grew up working on farms, in shops, in factories. Families were larger, and death was closer; most Americans had buried a sibling or a child by middle age.
Faith was more widespread, and community was not optional, because you needed your neighbors to survive the winter. Young men expected to serve, and most did. None of that is true at scale anymore. We have traded a lot of that hardness for comfort, and comfort does not produce the same kind of citizen.
But before we write off the next generation entirely, one caution is worth making. Every generation has looked at the one coming up and doubted whether they could handle what their fathers handled.
The parents of the Greatest Generation thought the Roaring Twenties kids were soft and frivolous, and then those same kids stormed the beaches of Normandy. The Revolutionary generation worried their sons were getting comfortable under the Constitution they had just bled for.
Hardness is not always visible until the moment demands it. There is something in Americans — or at least there has been that shows up when it has to. The real question is not whether this generation is soft. It is whether anything is still left to call them up.
The Corrosion From Within
Here is where we need to be honest about what is actually happening. Patriotism does not collapse from the outside. It corrodes from within, through the long, steady work of teach ing people to be ashamed of their own inheritance.
No foreign enemy has ever been able to do to America what we are currently doing to ourselves in our classrooms, our universities, our media, and increasingly our church es. An enemy can burn a flag. Only we can teach our own children that the flag was never worth raising in the first place. And this is not an accident. A nation’s story is the single most powerful thing it possesses, because the story tells the next generation who they are, where they came from, and what they owe to those who came before. Control the story, and you control whether the country continues. Break the story, and the country breaks with it not in one dramatic moment, but generation by generation, as fewer and fewer young people can answer the simple question: why should I love this place?
What we are living through is a deliberate effort, sustained over decades, to rewrite the American story as a story of villains rather than founders, of oppression rather than libera tion, of shame rather than grat itude. Washington is recast as a slaveholder before a general. Jefferson as a hypocrite before a philosopher. The pioneers as invaders. The industrialists as exploiters. The soldiers as imperialists. Every hero gets an asterisk. Every triumph gets a caveat. Every monument gets reconsidered. After enough of that, young people do not hate America. They become indiffer ent to it, which is worse. Ha tred at least implies the thing matters. Indifference means the inheritance has already been lost.
The Greatest Nation That Has Ever Existed
Let me say plainly what many people are no longer willing to say. America is the greatest nation that has ever existed on this earth, and it is not close. No country in human histo ry has done more to expand human freedom, lift people out of poverty, defeat tyranny, cure disease, feed the hungry, or cre ate opportunity for the ordinary person. No country has shed more blood for other people’s liberty with less territorial gain to show for it. No country has been more willing to reform itself from within, peacefully, through its own constitutional order.
That story is not propaganda. It is the historical record, and any honest account ing bears it out. Yes, America has sins. Every nation does, and ours are well-documented.
But a mature patriotism does not deny the sins it sets them against the whole, and the whole is overwhelmingly a story of a country that got more right than anyone before it and kept fixing what it got wrong.
The founders built a system capable of correcting itself, and it has, over and over. T hat is not shame. That is the greatest political achievement in human history. The people teaching our children to be ashamed of this country are not telling them the truth. They are telling them a selective, distorted fragment of the truth and calling it the whole.
And when a young person is fed nothing but the frag ment, they cannot be blamed for losing faith in the country. hey have never actually been told about it. You cannot ask someone to die for something you have spent their whole life telling them to be ashamed of.
Where the Flame Is Still Burning
Here is the good news, and it is the reason I am writing this rather than giving up. Patriotism is not dying of natural causes. It is being poisoned. And a poisoning can be stopped.
The divisiveness everyone complains about is not the cause of our weakened patriotism. It is the result of it. When people no longer share an inheritance, they fight over the estate. The way back is not a new war or another September 11th, God forbid we need one.
It is the slower work of rebuilding the places where patriotism is actually formed. Families that teach it at the dinner table. Churches that preach it without apology. Schools that tell the American story honestly but not hatefully. Local institutions, the volunteer fire department, the commissioners’ meeting, the county fair, the Memorial Day service at the cemetery, where people practice belonging to some thing bigger than themselves. Eastern North Carolina still has a lot of that infrastructure.
That is part of why patriotism feels more alive here than it does in much of the rest of the country. The flag still flies on front porches. The fire department still holds the fish fry. The pews still fill on Sunday. Neighbors still show up when neighbors need them.
The inheritance is still being handed down, hand to hand, in the places where institutions have not been hollowed out. That is worth defending, and it is worth telling the country about.
The Work Ahead
The rebuilding starts with refusing to let the corroders hold the pen. Parents telling their children the true, full story. Pastors preaching it without shame. Local leaders commissioners, fire chiefs, school board members modeling civic love in public. Writers and citizens and ordinary Americans taking up the story and refusing to let it be told only by those who despise it.
That is not nostalgia. That is how every genera tion of Americans before us kept the flame alive. It is how this one will too, if enough of us decide it is worth doing.
Ibelieve this generation can step up to the plate and deliver. They have it in them the same blood, the same soil, the same God-given capacity that their great-grandfathers carried across the beaches of Normandy and into the woods of the Ar dennes. What they need is for someone to tell them who they are and what they come from. They need the story back.
That is our job. Not theirs. Ours.
Patriotism was never automatic. It was taught, modeled, and handed down. If we want it back, we are the ones who have to hand it in.
John Spruill is a Roper resident and chair of the Washington County Board of Commissioners.