(Disclaimer: because protest has somehow become anonymous with disrespecting our citizens in service, an utterly baffling logic, let me say that I am in no way against anyone who has or is currently serving)

"If you don't like this country so much, then why don't you leave?"

God, is there a more grating sentence than that to hear come out of someone's mouth? The sad thing is, that's not even a straw man's quote I've conjured to win a discussion. That is actual discourse floating around right now in the wake of NFL protests.

How about this - picture if a loved one was in the hospital (may all loved ones in the hospital have a safe and speedy recovery) and, on the hospital's part, a doctor or nurse screwed up and ended up harming your loved one.

So you file a complaint, a perfectly valid complaint expressing justified anger and wanting change, perhaps dramatically so because it is an issue that demands immediate attention. But the employees at the hospital believe that to be applied to all of them, and suddenly, you find yourself with everyone saying, "If you hate this place so much, why come here?" instead of actually being helped, and seriously, you just want to see a wrong being righted!

One employee realizes the whole kerfuffle is misplaced - they poke their head up out of the din and ask: "Wait a second...just wait a second! What if - oh man, what if - those people are complaining for a reason? What if they act 'dramatically' because our attention really should be with them and they know we'll ignore them if they don't act this way?"

Do you see where I'm going with this?

So when did it become un-American to point out those wrongs? (Well, actually, since always, but that's a historical analysis for another time.)

When lives are at stake when personal freedoms are eroded, what obligation do we have to defend that? All over the world, that process has occurred, and it has led to ruin. Suddenly, an idea takes over and becomes so precious, so overwhelmingly beautiful, that the truth is no longer desirable. Suddenly, freedom dies. Freedom is the power of an individual's life and times.

Why? How do we become so enslaved to an entity that the pieces of that entity become disregarded?

Most of it - and my father and I discussed this very point just a day ago - stems from the fact that accepting you are wrong is very difficult. Accepting that you have played into a broken system, that your beliefs are objectively incorrect... well, there are few challenges quite as difficult as those.

When you look inward, to find what you truly are in the dark, you may not like what you find. But you know what? Everything is hard. Getting up in the morning, crawling out of bed, striving to keep improving your life is bloody difficult. Yet, just as humanity has done every day, and always must, we must march on. We wade through the muck. We inhale the stench. It's not just a task for us as long as we live; it's our sovereign mission.

Police brutality was never a problem in many of our lives, never a problem that challenged our comfort until...what? Until it disrupted a leisurely tradition that, let's be fair, we hardly even practice behind the safety of our own televisions? Until it challenged us to recognize that we are not living in a fully unified, post-racial society? Are so enthralled in a vision of a perfect country (spoiler alert: far from it) that those who beg us to see reality are enemies? Because of that delusion, that dream?

Your dream is someone else's nightmare. Help them, if you believe yourself to be a heroic citizen - wake up.

I have a horrible confession: whenever a football or baseball or water polo or extreme flying event is played on my television and the anthem comes, I usually saunter past, rarely ever stopping to hold my hand over my heart.

Magically, when I do, my compassion, empathy, and drive to help everyone around the country does not disappear.

Values should not be slaves to tradition; values are what make traditions worth keeping. Otherwise, it'd be 1776 in this country. Jingoism and denial are toxic. They are toxins bred to poison change, true change, and you poison yourself just as much when you ingest them and let them seep out of your mouth.

The anthem and flag are abstract concepts; they are not flesh and blood. They are not suffering in the streets, plain and simple.

They are mere toppings of a greater bedrock, one that cannot be ignored for pride, for false notions of patriotism. How can you? When those abstract concepts take precedence over those they wave over, then we dishonor everything they purportedly stand for.

If you care about something, and the people in it, you critique and criticize and fight to make it better because goddamnit, you do care. When your country espouses police brutality across its corners - and if you refuse to believe that racism still exists in this country, you have either never experienced it or just choose to ignore - it is a fever.

Plain and simple. Bodies push fevers out, or die.

You march out and demand attention, you exert strength in the fight because you are invested and you have hope. Hope for a light at the end of the dark tunnel's charge. We wouldn't do so if we didn't care.

Because then, yeah, you'd be right. Millions would have left by now.

When a system is in need of repair, it requires a critical eye to figure out what needs to be fixed. Failure to acknowledge that repairs must be made will lead to that system crumbling and breaking. Do you fix it? Or remain oblivious and let it break? The choice is yours.

Oh, by the way, the real American thing to do right now would be to donate to and help out Puerto Rico, as it is an American territory.