Bridget, “Please do not mistake my patriotism for blindness” carries the moral pressure of this whole essay. You take the Fourth past inherited celebration into the lived test of citizenship: reading the Bill of Rights differently after seeing your son in leg chains, sitting in hearings with almost no one present, filing letters and FOIA requests, and hearing official testimony collide with family knowledge. The force here is that love of country becomes more demanding once the promise has been tested against prison rooms, bureaucracy, addiction, and the silence of empty public halls. Thank you for showing patriotism as active responsibility, especially when liberty and justice become personal enough to require action.
Thanks for taking the points so completely! If we're not active in our communities, in our local political cultures, I think we can forget about changing the larger nation. It takes showing up, standing up, and staying in it to make this whole thing work.
Bridget, “showing up, standing up, and staying in it” carries the civic discipline your essay made visible. The larger nation is shaped through local rooms where hearings happen, records are requested, budgets are questioned, silence is interrupted, and families refuse to let systems remain unseen. That kind of patriotism is demanding because it asks people to love the country with enough seriousness to participate where change is slow, procedural, and often unattended. Grateful for the way you keep bringing citizenship back to presence, responsibility, and local courage.
Great article! Something is so profoundly broken in our nation, but we can fix it with work.
There are really great things happening in Texas. Yes-Texas. The women are mad, and we’re doing something about it. Mothers Against Greg Abbot (aka, MAGA the Good, and Mothers for Democracy) has endorsed the following candidates. One of my best friends is running for Texas House, so I have become familiar with various vetting processes it takes to get an endorsement, and this grassroots organization is very smart about it. Texas is a a major stronghold, and flipping it would be HUGE for the entire US. Thank you for sharing
Count me as a mother against Abbott. He has blood on his hands. For the sake of Texas citizens, Dear God, there has to be a better way there than the seven levels of carceral hell theatre that have played out for decades.
The prison experience undertaken from the outside and endured on the inside is more than a life-altering endeavor. It takes a superhuman effort to survive its corruption, its deliberate meanness, unfeeling indifference, and to each day muster up the determination (courage, if you will) to keep your head above the depths of despair--waiting for a rescue that lacks either the resources or courage to pull you from those dark waters of hopelessness.
I know your pain. I had survived death row and was into my 15th year of incarceration and had become a celebrated prison journalist when I met my wife in the death house standing next to the very electric chair I was once sentenced to die in. My wife, a television reporter at the time, and I fell in love that day--and for the next 25 years she spent every waking moment braced to take on the struggle for my freedom; 25 years enduring the threats on her life, the mental torture, physical abuse, and humiliations inherent in undertaking the prison experience from the outside. She ultimately brought the entire prison system to its knees, forcing it to the truce table, and walking me out of prison into my 40th year in the system. 20 years later we are like Alan Jackson's diddy "Living on Love."
As for dying, the human survival instinct does not permit many to say at this precise moment I am prepared to die for that. But the human spirit, with its resilence for courage, will decide to die at given moments when necessity leaves no choice or it is necessary to die to save someone else. My younger brother, as the youngest Marine in the Vietnam War, chose to dive into a swollen, raging river to try to save a fellow Marine who lost his grip on the lineline. Both young men died. Pat didn't awaken that day prepared to die for someone else but when the necessity presented itself, he reacted with the courage demanded at that moment.
There's a lot to be ashamed of, pissed off about, and despaired with the state of America today. But make no mistake about it, the core of the American spirit will fight and die, valiantly, when it has no choice--and all the orange clowns running the government and the MAGA motherfuckers touting their insane Putin-inspired shit will find that out.
Hope you have a blessed day--and that your struggles with the prison system will end soon.
It's an honor to have you here in these comments. Your experience is harrowing, your wife's is testament to what a human will endure on behalf of another. Thank you for sharing your beautiful story.
As for the reflections on dying for anything or anyone, you're saying it better than I could but I think the conviction to act with integrity or bravery or too act at all in any moment is hatched within oneself long before the moment comes though. Your brother, wow. And though it's been a lifetime, I'm sorry for your loss.
I stand with you on our prisons which have gotten even more horrific as we see how we treat immigrants. We don’t treat people with understanding and compassion unless they’re “our kind”. We pledge allegiance to the almighty dollar instead and there’s no building on this. It must shift towards a more loving union and that can’t be legislated. It must be demonstrated. But until then we must fight injustice of all kinds. Thank you for writing this.
We don't even treat our own kind with understanding and compassion. How could we ever expect to extend that outward? My son is lily white and was treated like a dog because the people running this system have zero accountability, bad training, decades of incentive to do wrong (for profit), and a mindset stuck in sick punishment models. We have to do better. 🖤
Yes! We have to. And I believe we will. Not being naive or overly optimistic. We will because we have to. We’re seeing things about ourselves we weren’t willing to see before. We can’t heal what we’re unwilling to look at. Healing comes next.
Bridget, “Please do not mistake my patriotism for blindness” carries the moral pressure of this whole essay. You take the Fourth past inherited celebration into the lived test of citizenship: reading the Bill of Rights differently after seeing your son in leg chains, sitting in hearings with almost no one present, filing letters and FOIA requests, and hearing official testimony collide with family knowledge. The force here is that love of country becomes more demanding once the promise has been tested against prison rooms, bureaucracy, addiction, and the silence of empty public halls. Thank you for showing patriotism as active responsibility, especially when liberty and justice become personal enough to require action.
Thanks for taking the points so completely! If we're not active in our communities, in our local political cultures, I think we can forget about changing the larger nation. It takes showing up, standing up, and staying in it to make this whole thing work.
Bridget, “showing up, standing up, and staying in it” carries the civic discipline your essay made visible. The larger nation is shaped through local rooms where hearings happen, records are requested, budgets are questioned, silence is interrupted, and families refuse to let systems remain unseen. That kind of patriotism is demanding because it asks people to love the country with enough seriousness to participate where change is slow, procedural, and often unattended. Grateful for the way you keep bringing citizenship back to presence, responsibility, and local courage.
I don't like to restock a post in tesponse to an essay as intense and purposeful as yours, but as a veteran, an old man, I must:
https://ialerch.substack.com/p/the-bad-guys-won-part-1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1a3noo
Thank you, Irving. I look forward to reading!
Great article! Something is so profoundly broken in our nation, but we can fix it with work.
There are really great things happening in Texas. Yes-Texas. The women are mad, and we’re doing something about it. Mothers Against Greg Abbot (aka, MAGA the Good, and Mothers for Democracy) has endorsed the following candidates. One of my best friends is running for Texas House, so I have become familiar with various vetting processes it takes to get an endorsement, and this grassroots organization is very smart about it. Texas is a a major stronghold, and flipping it would be HUGE for the entire US. Thank you for sharing
https://mothersagainstgregabbott.com/2026-endorsements/
Count me as a mother against Abbott. He has blood on his hands. For the sake of Texas citizens, Dear God, there has to be a better way there than the seven levels of carceral hell theatre that have played out for decades.
I felt every single word, comma, period of this! Profound!
Thanks, Bill. I know you know!
Another profound read❣️
Thank you for always reading!
Fire.
Thank you for dancing close enough to feel the heat! 🖤
There is nothing more radicalizing than being a mother of a child harmed by our systems. Solidarity, Bridget.
Ah, this! Thank you for standing with me. It takes a village (an Army, no doubt) to keep going.
The prison experience undertaken from the outside and endured on the inside is more than a life-altering endeavor. It takes a superhuman effort to survive its corruption, its deliberate meanness, unfeeling indifference, and to each day muster up the determination (courage, if you will) to keep your head above the depths of despair--waiting for a rescue that lacks either the resources or courage to pull you from those dark waters of hopelessness.
I know your pain. I had survived death row and was into my 15th year of incarceration and had become a celebrated prison journalist when I met my wife in the death house standing next to the very electric chair I was once sentenced to die in. My wife, a television reporter at the time, and I fell in love that day--and for the next 25 years she spent every waking moment braced to take on the struggle for my freedom; 25 years enduring the threats on her life, the mental torture, physical abuse, and humiliations inherent in undertaking the prison experience from the outside. She ultimately brought the entire prison system to its knees, forcing it to the truce table, and walking me out of prison into my 40th year in the system. 20 years later we are like Alan Jackson's diddy "Living on Love."
As for dying, the human survival instinct does not permit many to say at this precise moment I am prepared to die for that. But the human spirit, with its resilence for courage, will decide to die at given moments when necessity leaves no choice or it is necessary to die to save someone else. My younger brother, as the youngest Marine in the Vietnam War, chose to dive into a swollen, raging river to try to save a fellow Marine who lost his grip on the lineline. Both young men died. Pat didn't awaken that day prepared to die for someone else but when the necessity presented itself, he reacted with the courage demanded at that moment.
There's a lot to be ashamed of, pissed off about, and despaired with the state of America today. But make no mistake about it, the core of the American spirit will fight and die, valiantly, when it has no choice--and all the orange clowns running the government and the MAGA motherfuckers touting their insane Putin-inspired shit will find that out.
Hope you have a blessed day--and that your struggles with the prison system will end soon.
It's an honor to have you here in these comments. Your experience is harrowing, your wife's is testament to what a human will endure on behalf of another. Thank you for sharing your beautiful story.
As for the reflections on dying for anything or anyone, you're saying it better than I could but I think the conviction to act with integrity or bravery or too act at all in any moment is hatched within oneself long before the moment comes though. Your brother, wow. And though it's been a lifetime, I'm sorry for your loss.
I stand with you on our prisons which have gotten even more horrific as we see how we treat immigrants. We don’t treat people with understanding and compassion unless they’re “our kind”. We pledge allegiance to the almighty dollar instead and there’s no building on this. It must shift towards a more loving union and that can’t be legislated. It must be demonstrated. But until then we must fight injustice of all kinds. Thank you for writing this.
We don't even treat our own kind with understanding and compassion. How could we ever expect to extend that outward? My son is lily white and was treated like a dog because the people running this system have zero accountability, bad training, decades of incentive to do wrong (for profit), and a mindset stuck in sick punishment models. We have to do better. 🖤
Yes! We have to. And I believe we will. Not being naive or overly optimistic. We will because we have to. We’re seeing things about ourselves we weren’t willing to see before. We can’t heal what we’re unwilling to look at. Healing comes next.
I will join your rebel-rousing campaign ,,,, been in it alone for years! I’m coming with you! 💪🙏🇺🇸