Until recently I would have responded “The United States of America” in an eye blink. I am the son of a WW II veteran and a veteran myself. Born in the late 1940s, I imbibed patriotism from the very air that surrounded me in small town Saluda. As a boy I recall poking poppies in my button holes on Memorial Day and feeling quite proud.

I read the American Legion Magazine and remember the politicians of the day speaking to audiences with rhetoric soaked in the red, white, and blue. William Jennings Bryan Dorn and Strom Thurmond bounced their words about patriots and the communist menace off my ears in person.

My patriotism expanded seeing the success of the Civil Rights campaign. I got it. We are a country that values democracy and fair play. Ironically it deepened during the Vietnam War era, despite Nixon’s prolongation of the conflict. His promise to end the war was hollow but American protest ended the war. Democracy worked. LBJ pushed through laws guaranteeing Civil Rights. I loved America with my teenage soul.

My country the greatest clung to me. One of the most profound joys of my life was to retire from my regular work after 34 years and fall into idea of camping in every state. I have slept on the ground of 47, most more than once. I have visited most of America’s national parks and know her beauty and grandeur first hand. Reading books about the Civil War and Truman or Hoover would send me on history camping expeditions to walk its battlefields and see where Presidents grew up.

I have gone volcano camping in the West and traced the Nachez Trail and followed the Mississippi from its humble creek bed origins in Minnesota to New Oreleans on various camping trips. The majority of the time I put my tent on pads in parks designed and built by the CCC during FDR’s Presidency. America’s parks are proof of it greatness and a permanent testament to its citizens hard labor.

The re-election of former President Trump jolted me. My off and on melancholy turned to border-line depression. I do not mind the rise of mercurial extreme rightwing politics so much as I hate Trump for instigating an insurrection and denying his loss to Biden. Trump has changed America and me by fomenting, directing, and instigating an attack on the seat of government for all of us to see on TV. His supporters damn near killed Vice President Pence and one of them took time to drop his pants to defecate on the Speaker of the House’s desk.

Call it a slow-developing epiphany. I came to realize that my love for America needed to re-examined. I have taken my love for her off the shining top shelf. She is still high up, especially the idea of her as a location for immigrants–we are all immigrants–who come to the land of opportunity and literally constitute the nation’s motto: E Pluribus Unum.

Never before have we had citizens anxious to show fealty to a would-be dictator/king. I have seen him in person at rallies belittling others. His junior high school bully boy style has created more cliques than I ever saw in my years of overseeing children in hallways and cafeterias. Who would have ever thought that a former President’s name-calling would come to be adored? I accept his election but disdain his divisiveness.

The “out of many, one” notion is under attack by dark forces that do not respect others. Recent news of Trump’s purposeful nomination of cabinet officers who do not have the credentials that required to do their jobs is disturbing as is their complete fealty to Trump which seems to supersede their loyalty to the Constitution.

All of President Biden’s cabinet has remained intact, even though some of them have told hard truths to Biden. All of Trump’s former cabinet changed over time again and again in the span of his first tumultuous term; he had five Secretary of Defenses. He proudly, publicly proclaimed that he was smarter than the military’s leaders.

We could be in for a very destabilizing time which would delight Trump and Musk and the other billionaires who have coalesced around the incoming administration. I think the instability could cut the legs off our democracy as it currently functions. A type of autocracy could develop.

We will see but I feel calmer now with my epiphany. America is a mighty country, a good country, but it is obsessed with division, not unity. The super rich and powerful are in ascendence; MAGA Trump tribalism is all the rage. I am still an American but I am not a proud American who automatically thinks his country the best. Its very union is threatened but the memory of Lincoln remains as an inspiration we came come back to.