Recently, the NFL announced that all of its athletes must stand while the national anthem is played before football games. Although players have the option of staying in the locker room during the song, they cannot kneel without facing fines. After a season of players taking a knee during the anthem to protest police brutality—and the corresponding outrage from conservatives who insist such a protest could only be anti-military—the NFL has finally landed on a solution that will minimize negative publicity.

But any indignation at the protesting players is misplaced. It presumes that patriotism, pride in the country we all share, is one-size fits all and therefore always looks the same: respecting the flag and the anthem with specific physical behavior.

But that's a pretty passive way to love your country. Standing on cue does not automatically make you a better American than someone who refuses to.

The NFL players who knelt during the national anthem did not do so because they hated the United States. They were not trying to invalidate the sacrifice of our military members or change the way we listen to the national anthem.

It wasn't about the national anthem at all—or the flag. It was a much deeper display of patriotism. They were trying to send a message about racial profiling and its fatal consequences, highlighting the kind of injustice that, until it is corrected, will always keep this country from matching the ideals of equality and opportunity it claims to be founded upon.

If you care more about symbols like the flag than you do about black men getting shot by law enforcement or immigrants being torn from their children for daring to seek the same American dream you take pride in, you love the country in the abstract. You don't love it enough to recognize that it is flawed and should be fixed.

You mistake what our country is for what it could be, you silence those who want to change this, and then you congratulate yourself on being patriotic.

True patriotism is not unwavering loyalty. It's not pride regardless of circumstances.

And it's not coerced, either. If people are only performing patriotism because doing otherwise invites punishment, then they are not genuinely respecting the country anyway. They are just repressing their critiques in order to behave in a way that makes you more comfortable.

You can't make people love this country. But luckily for you, the people you're complaining about already do.