The Courage to Keep Building
Every year on Veterans Day, we pause to honor those who have served — not just for their sacrifice, but for their belief in a country that could live up to its promise. Service members sign up for the idea of America as much as the reality of it: a place where courage and community outweigh fear and division.
But belief alone doesn’t make that promise real. Every generation has to decide, again and again, what kind of country we want to be. Veterans know this better than most. They have seen what happens when democracy breaks down, when freedom is threatened, when hate becomes policy. And they also know that America’s strength has never come from uniformity, but from the messy, beautiful work of belonging.
As we honor veterans this week, we must also honor that idea — that democracy isn’t a given, and inclusion isn’t inevitable. Both have to be defended. Both have to be built.
That work is under siege today. The U.S. military was the first government institution to desegregate, through Executive Order 9981 in 1948, yet the struggle for inclusion and recognition continues. Across the country, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — the quiet infrastructure of belonging in our schools, workplaces, and communities — are being dismantled. Politicians are pushing fear instead of fairness, claiming that DEI divides us, that representation is somehow un-American. But if you listen closely, what they’re really saying is that they want to decide who America is for. Under the Trump administration, efforts have been made to erase the contributions and history of veterans from marginalized communities, including attempts to purge DEI references and remove images honoring diversity within the Pentagon.
And the attacks haven’t stopped at symbolic gestures. The administration has moved to fire more than 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs — many of them veterans — in an effort to roll back the agency to 2019 staffing levels. The cuts gut essential programs, slash mental health services, and destabilize care for millions. VA doctors have warned that the move could “collapse the system from within,” while veterans’ groups from the VFW to the American Legion have called it an “attack on those who served.” At the same time, the administration has pushed to weaken collective bargaining rights for VA employees and cancel billions in contracts that fund cancer care and toxic exposure programs for veterans. These efforts don’t just threaten jobs — they threaten lives. They send a chilling message: that veterans’ well-being is expendable, that care can be privatized or politicized at will.
If we want to talk about patriotism, let’s talk about that.
The truth is, DEI and veterans’ care are part of the same fight: a fight for dignity, belonging, and truth. Both are about whether we believe every person — every American — deserves to be seen and supported. When we strip away those protections, we betray the very freedoms veterans fought to defend.
Because the true story of America is the story of inclusion expanding. Every major step toward justice — from the GI Bill to the Civil Rights Act to marriage equality — was once framed as too radical, too disruptive, too soon. Yet every time, progress proved what veterans already knew: courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision to move forward anyway.
In a moment when fear is loud, courage must be louder.
That’s what the veterans we honor today remind us. Not just through parades or ceremonies, but through their example — the understanding that freedom means responsibility, that patriotism means participation, that service doesn’t end when the uniform comes off. It continues when we show up for one another.
And make no mistake: showing up for DEI, for equity, for representation — that is a form of service. It is an act of faith in the nation’s unfinished work.
The veterans who built bridges between races in the 1940s, who demanded equal access to benefits in the 1960s, who fought for inclusion in the armed forces itself — they all carried that same faith. They believed America could keep evolving, that the country they returned to could become more just than the one they left.
We owe them the same courage.
When a teacher loses her job for saying that Black history is American history, when a veteran with a disability is told he doesn’t qualify for support, when a trans service member’s dignity is debated on the Senate floor — our silence is complicity. Honoring veterans means fighting for the freedoms they defended, especially when they are under attack.
True patriotism is the ongoing work of building a country worthy of those who put on the uniform. That means protecting the right to vote. It means telling the full story of our nation, not the sanitized one. It means standing up for diversity and equity not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.
The courage to keep building is the most patriotic act we have.
This Veterans Day, let’s honor service not just with words, but with action. Let’s carry forward the quiet bravery of those who believed America could be better — and who made it their mission to prove it. Let’s defend DEI not as a partisan issue, but as an American one.
Because the courage to serve and the courage to keep building the promise of America are one and the same.