Years ago a prophet named Frank Costanza had a fight in a department store over a doll and it resulted in a new holiday being formed. That holiday has allowed us, for years, to air our grievances at the end of each year as a way of celebrating life. Gather ’round your aluminum poles and let’s celebrate together.

This year has been hard. Nothing has been normal, people have been distant, and Taco Bell did away with a majority of their menu at a time when Americans were already struggling. We’ve seen division like never before, and while many are thinking “2021 is coming!” I’m not sure I see that as the salvation of humanity.

America has an identity crisis. The streets are filled with people screaming conspiracy theories, complaining about communism, or telling perfect strangers they want nothing more than to kill off democracy…but for some reason we don’t seem capable of understand that those are only symptoms of the issue. The issue is that we’re divided over an ideology nobody is discussing: Social Responsibility vs Personal Liberty.

A long long time ago, in a place not so far away, a government system was created to protect and care for the American people. Over the next 100 years or so they introduced a massive number of alterations to their initial ruleset so that we’d be protected not only from foreign entities but also ourselves. Those amendments and what really govern much of what the federal government can do and how we interact with it…but that’s also where the arguments come from.

What it all boils down to is that we can choose to see those amendments as either Social Responsibility, where we’re responsible for making sure our country and its people are all cared for properly, or Personal Liberty, where we’re given the freedom to be the people we want to be without interference from others. We’re meant to see them as both. The Constitution is meant to give us the freedom to live our lives the way we see fit, if we’re not interfering with the lives of others (since doing so infringes on their freedom to live the way they see fit), while also demanding that we use the freedoms we have to care for each other. If we don’t, we’re not living as a society and the whole system breaks down.

We can’t focus on only one side of the argument or the other – neglecting half o the equation means our country is no-longer a society of people, but eventually just a place where people live. Patriotism means we have to care more about the health and wellbeing of our society than our own, at times. Not doing exactly that makes us unpatriotic, and unAmerican.

Think about what would change if we cared more about the well-being of people we don’t know than we do ourselves. Think about how different our country would be, how much better off life could be, and how much further we could go together.