The Real Meaning of Proud

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Fourth of July seems a slightly better day as any to salute America’s Proud Boys (I’d salute the Girls, too, but the Boys are wonderfully old-fashioned in their thinking and have a separate organization for girls called Proud Boys’ Girls which shows pride of ownership).

Early January, the Proud Boys celebrated their independence early, by storming the Capitol to prove they are independent of democracy itself. Who needs an election when you can just plant your Trump flag deep into the body of a Capitol police officer and declare a winner?

A few months ago an underappreciative Canadian government designated the Proud Boys a terrorist entity. Canadians.

The Proud Boys much prefer to call themselves Western Chauvinists. Partly because Western Chauvinists have no geographical imperative to share common cultural ideas, philosophical foundations, and ancestral beliefs with people who look to them like Shylock or Little Black Sambo. Partly because Western Chauvinists sounds more pleasing to the ear than Neo-Nazi Ninnies.

But I write not to praise the Proud Boys (we have a former President for that), but to solicit your stories about what’s in their name.

We all have done things of which we are ashamed. But we all have also done things of which we are proud. I want to hear about those things of which you are proud, of one moment in your career, one moment in your passing through this life, that made you feel elevated, that made you think perhaps someone around you felt elevated by what you did.

Tell me, and in the next time or two I’ll write about what you told me.

Just don’t — do not — tell me you’re one of them Proud Boys.