Toby Keith died today. He’s the first one to go that I grew up with. Now I understand why when Tom Petty passed my mom played his music videos on YouTube for a week straight in legitimate mourning. It really makes you face the world and how it’s not the one you grew up in. Toby Keith was on the radio when I was in the backseat of mom’s old caddy on the way to school in fifth grade. She always wanted to listen to NPR to get her news before she went into work and I would beg her to turn on 98.1 the whole ten minutes it took to get there. Toby Keith taught me about fast women, dive bars, brokenhearted grown-ups, and American Pride like he was a cool older cousin who’d lived ten lives.

Now I’ve grown up and experienced most of what he taught me about and I listen to a lot more indie pop and Fleetwood Mac than country and I live in a real city. My dad called me last week and told me they paved the dirt part of our road all the way to the highway. At the same time it’s an election year and there’s war in the Middle East again and Taylor Swift is back and the job market is trash. When I was growing up his songs made sense. And it was that intense patriotism and pride that kept us all on board and not asking questions. But by high school I had seen veterans coming home destroyed and unsupported and they were making movies about it and starting foundations.

Freshman year a girl I ran cross country with who had joined the Marines came back in dress blues to visit for an event. She was five years older than me and blonde and so much fun and I always looked up to her. She was so excited and proud. I grew up in between six military bases and that was the first time it hit me that when she deployed she might come back in a box with a flag on it. Like on TV. My friend, this girl that kept us laughing during those awful workouts in the worst heat and ran a marathon with no training just to see if she could might get blown to bits in some half-abandoned street. And I couldn’t be proud of that anymore. I couldn’t watch the people I grew up with that couldn’t go to college sign up for a dream and glory with no guarantee of support from either a grateful nation or a deadbeat government.

Somewhere along the way the Democrats became the government that our dads told us not to trust and the Republicans and the Evangelicals were the nation we were fighting for. And now we know what we know and maybe we had to go over there but we didn’t need to stay. Or propagandize entire rich, beautiful, suffering cultures into primitive slurs. Truth be told, I had forgotten what all that felt like until I had to sit up today and look around. This world looks different, I look different, the pride I have for my country looks different. So I listened to all those old songs and I cried like I always do when “American Soldier” and “Courtesy of the Red, White And Blue” played but this time it was as much remembering what it was like to be that sure of everything as it was gratitude for those who gave the ultimate sacrifice so I can sit here and write about Toby Keith.

To be born American was to know with perfect certainty my worldview. To have it distorted and stripped from me as the nation reinvents itself for the umpteenth time is as painful as it is necessary. I truly sympathize with the people gripping onto the America they lost ten years ago—as useless as it is. It’s something no other country grapples with in the way we do. No other country is as responsive and resilient and ridiculous. So that’s where I find my American Pride now. I am very proud to have so much discourse and scrutiny in a country with so many upset people who care about every possible issue. I am proud to know this is a nation that wakes up to its problems however long that takes and I’m proud that it can take all this expansion and change and I’m proud that many, many Americans must believe it too because every time I look around there is a new group forming or a new issue being explained and so many people fighting for a better life here.

We must all have that pride—we wouldn’t be fighting if we didn’t. And I still cannot stand to hear anyone in another country tell me what’s wrong with mine. And I still love Toby Keith.