Giving Thanks: A Small Act of Defiance I Didn’t Expect to Make

A Simple Choice Taught Me About Freedom

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for a moment of moral clarity in a year that has worn so many of us down.

I had been thinking about getting a passport card for a while. After watching videos of American citizens being stopped or pulled aside, some detained for days without any justifiable cause, the idea of an extra layer of protection began to make sense. Fear can make us question our own belonging, even when nothing about it should ever have required explanation.

So I set aside last Saturday to take care of it. The afternoon fell into the familiar rhythm of driving my kids from one activity to the next. When I dropped them off, they asked their routine question. “Are you picking us up later?” They meant it the same way they always do. For a brief moment, I imagined a different kind of interruption: someone asking me for papers I did not carry, judging my loyalty to a president rather than to the Constitution, or questioning what should never be questioned. The sadness of that possibility lingered longer than I expected. No child should wonder whether the person coming to pick them up might be held back for reasons that have nothing to do with who they are.

I parked the car, opened my laptop, and pulled up the application. Getting a passport card when you already have a passport is routine. All I had to do was add a separate form, some photos, and thirty dollars. It felt almost like an afterthought. And yet I could not move past it to start the process.

I sat with that page longer than I care to admit. Part of me wondered if refusing the passport card made me naïve, careless, or unprepared for a moment that might one day arrive. Another part wondered what it meant to say yes, whether choosing the card would be an admission that I expected to be doubted, that I assumed I would need to prove something others do not have to prove.

I was caught between those thoughts when clarity surfaced. If I chose the passport card out of fear, I would be agreeing to a version of America I will never accept. I would also be telling myself a story about my place in this country that I refuse to believe. I do not have another citizenship waiting for me. I do not plan to seek one somewhere else. This place is home in every way that matters. That means I have no real choice except to live as if that is true.

So I decided it was time to take a stand. I refused to apply for the passport card, and the choice felt honest in a way I needed. It was my way of saying that this is my country, and that I do not need to prove my belonging twice. Like so many Americans before me, I do not need a special document to claim the freedom that is already mine.

The clarity that followed settled in slowly. The past nine years have been exhausting in ways I did not fully appreciate while living through them, and this last year especially so. I have carried a quiet anger for months, anger over what has been said and done and threatened, anger over how easily fear can shape the boundaries of daily life. I had wanted to push back on the direction the country was taking, to name what felt wrong.

But I often found myself too worn down to follow through. Forgoing the passport card reminded me that the ability to resist had not disappeared. It had only been quiet. In that stillness, it surfaced again.

As I closed my laptop, I snapped it shut a little harder than usual, the way you do when something has finally been decided, and I kept thinking about how belonging can feel effortless for some and conditional for others. As the early signs of the holidays appeared, I remembered a story about a voice we hear every December, Frank Sinatra, and the decision he made long before he became part of America’s winter soundtrack. Before he was famous, someone told him that “Sinatra” sounded too Italian and urged him to change it to “Frankie Satin.” But he chose to keep the name. That quiet decision to hold on to something that mattered to a person now expanded everyone’s imagination on who belongs. And now, when we hear Sinatra, we hear an American voice.

His voice has carried generations through uncertain seasons. In The House I Live In - That’s America to Me, he sang about the country he believed in, not a perfect one, but a place where ordinary people, in ordinary moments, made the idea of America real. A place defined less by its certainties than by its willingness to grow into its better self. That vision feels honest to me, especially now.

This year has felt heavy. It is hard to write about possibility when uncertainty sits so close, and harder still to write about hope when fear keeps weaving into ordinary places. But we have lived through other moments when fear tried to crowd out what was best in this American life.

There was the Red Scare, a period when suspicion moved faster than facts and loyalty itself became a question. Some concerns were real, but the way people were pursued without evidence or restraint, and without respect for the procedures that protect us, created a deep unease. It was a moment that tested who we believed ourselves to be. Many in power, and many in the public, let it continue and hoped it would burn itself out. It is disappointing to see echoes of that now, when fear of the loudest voices keeps too many leaders from speaking plainly about what they know to be true.

History also reminds us that change often begins with a spark. Even in the 1950s, some people refused to wait for the fear to pass. Margaret Chase Smith was one of them. She was a senator from Maine, and giving speeches was part of her job, but one speech carried a different weight. In 1950, she delivered what she called a Declaration of Conscience, a brief and steady statement challenging Joseph McCarthy’s tactics before it was fashionable or safe to do so. It did not make headlines at the time. It was simply a moment when she chose clarity over convenience. She spoke plainly in a season of fear, and the country was better for it.

These moments, Sinatra’s name, and Margaret Chase Smith’s conscience, returned to me because, as Americans, it must not feel normal to carry extra papers to prove our citizenship. It must not feel ordinary to worry that someone in authority might question our place because of our skin color, background, job, or even where we choose to shop on Black Friday. The idea of America was meant to rest on the quiet expectation of equal standing. At least on paper, most of the time.

When I returned later that afternoon to pick up my children, they ran toward the car without thinking about anything beyond the rest of their day. Watching them, I felt how different their world is from the one I grew up in. They move through their lives with an ease that would not have been possible for me or for my parents in earlier decades. They assume a place for themselves that earlier generations could not count on. I also know that ease is not guaranteed, not in a moment when belonging is questioned in ways that should trouble all of us. Whatever future they inherit will depend less on the dramatic events we cannot predict and more on the quiet choices we make now, the choices that reveal who we are and what kind of country we hope they will grow up in.

And this Thanksgiving, in a year that does not make gratitude easy, I find myself holding on to something simple. The country still has the capacity to change. Small acts, a name kept, a conscience spoken, a refusal offered without ceremony, add up over time. I hope they make room for those who come after us. I hope they steady the parts of our shared life that feel fragile now. Each of us can choose one that fits the shape of our lives, in the company we keep, the businesses we support, or the willingness to say what is true even when the conversation is uncomfortable. It does not have to be dramatic. It just has to be deliberate.

So to answer Frank Sinatra’s question, “What is America to me?”

It is an unfinished home, with room to grow. A place shaped again and again by the small decisions of its people. For now, in this season, a small act of defiance is what we need.

And that is enough.

That is America to me.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thumbnail image by freepik