I made my first visit to Washington, D.C. over spring break. It was prime time in the city for elementary and middle school field trips, so a constant mass of children roamed the halls of our nation’s museums alongside me. I attempted to distinguish myself — convey my maturity and wisdom (and my Georgetown-chic sensibilities) — with black booties and a striped sweater, heaven forbid I betray my true identity as a Berkeley student. I strutted the halls alone, carrying a tote bag stuffed with purpose and my puffer jacket, my heels clipping as I walked.
But I, a naive first timer to the National Mall and the wonders of America that it contains, was left in awe by the mall’s contents. They talk about childlike wonder, but they don’t talk about fifth-grade-trip-to-DC wonder. I anticipated a brief jaunt to the Mall, a stroll, a (pre)amble. Instead, I was met with an inability to pry my eyes from everything that surrounded me.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History was my favorite part of the Mall. Its 300,000 square feet of public exhibition space are filled with anything and everything that could reasonably fall under the term “American history.” I often think about how the Internet works (or rather, how I don’t know how it works). That museum felt like a feeling of confusion, wonder, and awe in one. I was met with all of America at once, and I couldn’t look away.
Here was a copy of our nation’s past, present, and its future: A robin’s egg-blue reconstruction of a Chicago train car, replete with an advertisement for Wrigley’s “Juicy Fruit” gum and a poster for an anti-littering campaign. In a section on the history of patents and trademarks in America: a pair of Levi’s jeans depicting their iconic “Two Horse” patch, an original Apple computer, an Etch-a-Sketch, the yellow and green color scheme of John Deere equipment. The museum acts as a walkable advertisement for American capitalism. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t work on me.
In a classic blunder of American childhood, I, at age eight, presumed the National Mall to be a typical mall, featuring stores such as Claire’s and Auntie Anne’s. Upon learning it wasn’t, I questioned why it was called a mall in the first place. The answer? The term “mall” originally referred to a location for people to play pall-mall, a game similar to croquet. Then, it evolved to mean a collective gathering space, to walk and socialize as a community. It is this second meaning that is reflected in the Mall’s nickname “America’s Front Yard.”
“America’s Front Yard.” The vision of ourselves that we present to the world, and to ourselves: where you can roam from Hope Diamond to Melania Trump’s inauguration dress, from dinosaur fossils to painstaking reconstructions of the heads of ancient humans, from commemorative fountain to shining commemorative fountain. In my time on the Mall, in our Front Yard, I felt lost in the proverbial sauce of American pride.
Upon entering the Lincoln Memorial, I was met with the grandeur of the marble, the 19-foot-tall, 175-ton statue of Lincoln, the intricate ceiling with its white marble and bronze details. More importantly, I came face to face with the gigantic engravings of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.
Facing Lincoln’s words, I remembered a time when my mother, in third grade, had encouraged me to memorize his inaugural address. For the first time, I understood what she was getting at with the task: being forced to confront the values that shaped our country.
Frankly, it was frightening — to look up at the Gettysburg address and its declaration of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Lincoln writes of the fight to maintain that nation.
The sun rises on Lincoln’s statue on the memorial | Image Source: Pixabay
On the mall, I saw all of America, its origins and its current state, and I couldn’t look away. But the fact of Trump’s presidency never seemed too far out of reach. I felt, on one level, more patriotic than I ever had before. I felt a renewed appreciation for the values laid out all around me — the multiculturalism, the respect for science and innovation, the valorization of liberty and freedom, and all the things I’d learned make America what it is. But I couldn’t escape the thought of how many people in the Lincoln Memorial alongside me voted for Trump, believing in his policies rooted in cruelty and fear and hatred — and equating those values with the words of freedom and liberty written on the walls beside us. The chaperones of the 5th grade trips, the parents of children, the various tourists from around America: Did they think that modern America is getting closer to that ideal Lincoln spoke of, 162 years ago? How could they?
Did they think the present administration reflected that “government of the people, by the people, for the people?” Did they think everything tied to the “administration” as a concept and an actor, as a source of pain and conflict and violence, was moving us in the progress of this “great task?”
One interactive exhibit from the American history museum particularly stuck with me. It instructed attendees: “Make your own declaration about what independence means.” On pink and green sticky notes, respondents answered: “I will speak My Mind!!;” “Freedom of Speech;” “Self-governance, low taxes, equality;” “Freedom to praise and worship God freely!!!;” “Making decisions that only affect your life without being stopped or hurt by others (including the government!);” “To me independence means you can follow your own path and people can’t stop you from it.”
I didn’t leave my own sticky note on the board; I was too busy trying to get to the next exhibit, the next wonder that lay just out of sight. But if I had written out what independence means to me, I think I would describe it as the ability to decide what makes you yourself, wherever and whenever you are in this country.
And I left the Mall wondering: what does it mean to be patriotic in today’s America?
As Americans, we would like to think we recognize the importance of our founding ideals, and the ideals that continue to shape us as a nation. That’s why we have all these monuments, why we inscribed them so long ago in stone, set aside labor and funds, and constructed over 1000 total acres of monuments and museums — to preserve what makes us a nation. We like the aesthetics of those ideals, even if their execution leaves much to be desired.
Nations are bound together by their shared culture and values, and history. But they are also bound together by circumstance — the circumstance that makes America, America. Today, this would be the Trump administration, which is also redefining what it means to be American.
It was impossible, looking around at all the children that surrounded me, to avoid the thought of myself at their age. Fifth-grade me was in the second year of the first Trump administration. Fifth-grade me had lived the majority of her life under the promise that America would progress, seeing the 2016 election as an exception rather than the rule. Fourth-grade me had watched in excitement, confusion, and then in shock as Trump took the election from what my mother had promised me would be the first female president. Now, as a freshman in college, I feel like all bets are off. I’m no longer sure that America will progress.
In a Global 45 lecture, one of my professors described how a person waking up in Berkeley and a person waking up in Wyoming may live entirely different lives, yet they are bound together by their shared identity as Americans. (His example: if you say you’re bringing your friend to a party, and you said your friend is American, that description does not conjure up any specific image. Compare that to other nationalities, where ethnicity and nationality and general cultural presuppositions are far more interlinked.)
This range of the American experience is also reflected in the sheer variety of the contents of the various museums, the variety that so fascinated me. But in the “absence of such consensus,” as one article by Jocelyn J. Evans and Kyrsten B. York put it, the museums and outward presentation of our nation are rendered “subject to commemorating everything and memorializing everyone.”
Yet not only may the lives of our Berkelian and our Wyomingite differ — it is also their understanding of what it means to be an American that can easily vary greatly. And that is what scares me.
On the mall, I felt a profound sense of loss — loss for the version of America I felt was promised to me as a child, loss for the version of America prophesied in these scriptures and founding texts. Loss, as well, for the patriotism I felt I should feel toward America: a less critical, more enthusiastic patriotism. A patriotism in which I wouldn’t wander the American history museum and wonder if an exhibit on the wage gap — depicting how the salaries of the top 1 percent have risen as those of the bottom 10 percent have remained stagnant — would soon be deemed too radical and removed entirely.
In fact, this fear has already come true. In 2025, the White House published a list of Smithsonian exhibits they found objectionable and began conducting a process of “internal review” to ensure the museum’s content aligned with their own ideological agenda. In a letter to the museum, they demanded that the museum “begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.”
After I returned home from D.C., my dad and I drove up the Northern California coast on a gorgeous sunny day. Pasted on the telephone poles all throughout rural Marin County were advertisements for the No Kings protest. The protest marked the third of its kind — a day of coordinated protests against the Trump administration throughout all American states and over a dozen countries. March 28’s protest was also the largest single-day protest in American history.
Maybe that’s what patriotism means now: patriotism with an asterisk next to it. Or maybe that’s what patriotism has always meant — not the blind allegiance to state and country of nationalism, but the goal of betterment in mind. We risk conflating the two, especially as our president enacts policies such as the one passed to make the contents of Smithsonian placards “unifying, historically accurate, and constructive” and presents his ideology of uniform American exceptionalism as patriotism.
Lincoln himself was not uniformly considered a patriot at his time. His Emancipation Proclamation was reviled in The Chicago Times as “a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide.” Columbus, Ohio’s “The Crisis,” asked of the Proclamation, “Is not this a Death Blow to the Hope of Union?” Yet we have him and his pursuit of freedom against all odds to thank for the country we live in today.
Despite this, I still believe patriotism means what it did so long ago, and what it feels like it should not have to mean today: fighting for your country, even and especially in times of duress. The loss of the assumption that America is moving toward that oft-lauded “more perfect union” is a terrifying one. But it need not be ruinous. Our nation has weathered the grand and the terrible alike for what will, in two months, be 250 years; I believe it can weather this moment of division and disillusionment as well.
Despair is the easy response. But I keep returning to a single sentence, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg, as instruction just as much as inspiration. 160 years old and still it moves me: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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