Noticing What Matters: A Writer’s Reflection on Service and Civic Bonding
Standing nearly alone during military songs, I realized good writing begins by noticing what unsettles us. In divided times, we risk losing the shared trust that some things matter more than our differences—and that’s worth standing for.
As troops appeared in American cities this year, my views of military service and civic responsibility bumped up against personal memories and public debate. What follows is an essay I wrote back in 2024 with slight updates for the current moment.
Last year, at a packed auditorium, the Navy’s Commodores played their final notes. As “The Army Song” and “Anchors Aweigh” began, I stood—proudly, for my father and both grandfathers. Looking around, though, I saw only a handful of others standing. In a room of 250, I felt my military connections stranded in a sea of civilian life.
That moment standing alone became the seed of this essay. Good writing starts with paying attention and letting questions drive the narrative. The short essay that follows began in that auditorium and grew into a reflection on service, community, and civic trust in modern America.
This division, I've realized, isn’t about who stands for service songs. It represents a shift in how Americans understand sacrifice and collective purpose. When my father and grandfathers wore the uniform, invisible threads knit communities together nationwide. Factory workers’ sons stood alongside ranchers’ sons, city kids alongside farm kids. A shared language—from understanding military time to knowing what “watch your six” means—bound together Americans who otherwise had little in common.
I’m not trying to romanticize military service here. If given the choice, my father and many others might have reconsidered going to war. Trauma and sacrifice shouldn’t be glossed over with patriotic platitudes.
As these connections fade, we lose more than cultural literacy about military life. We lose the visceral understanding of what it means to subordinate individual desires to collective needs. We lose the experience of being part of something larger than ourselves, where your squadmate’s background, politics, or social media posts matter far less than their reliability when lives are on the line.
Earlier this year, when National Guard troops were being deployed to American cities amid lawsuits and political standoffs debating the legality of such deployments, the line between public service, duty to country, and political theater is blurred and frayed. Commands to strike "the enemy within" are bigoted and hateful, and my sympathy shifts to those in the National Guard who must reconcile duty with conscience.
The uniform is just one patch in the quilt of civic service. Teaching, volunteering, and medical care are the warp and weft that bind us together.
But military life asks something unique:
What would I risk my life for?
What does it mean to put the welfare of strangers above my own?
Could I trust people whose beliefs radically differ from mine in life-or-death situations?
When I see calls to expand national service programs or create new forms of civic engagement, I wonder if we’re addressing the right problem. The question isn’t simply how to get more Americans serving their neighborhoods—though that’s important. The deeper question—one I can’t fully answer in this essay and won’t try to—is how to maintain our capacity for collective sacrifice and cross-cultural trust in an increasingly individualistic age. Perhaps these particular bonds of service are gone forever; perhaps something new will take their place.
Standing solo in that concert hall, and again now as I follow the news, I worry we're losing a shared understanding that some things matter more than our differences, that we’re capable of putting others before ourselves, that we can still trust across the divides that increasingly define us. And that, I think, is something worth standing for.
