The Power of Possessives
By Commander Steven M. Wendelin, USN (Retired)
When I was a young junior officer in the Navy, I was once admonished (that’s a polite word for “chewed out”) for referring to San Clemente Island as “my island” in front of a group of visiting senior civil servants. As the Island Operations Officer, I took enormous pride in the work my team and I were doing to revitalize a weathered old outpost that had been battered by use since the 1940s. Calling it my island just felt right.
My boss didn’t agree. He reminded me that the island was under the jurisdiction of the Commanding Officer of Naval Air Station North Island. “It’s the C.O.’s island,” he told me. I wisely held back from pointing out that, technically, it belonged to the American taxpayers.
That moment stuck with me. It was the first time I realized just how powerful possessive pronouns can be.
Fast forward 27 years to present-day Hardy County, West Virginia.
I was at a gas station in Wardensville when an older man saw my anti-Trump bumper sticker and said, with disdain, “That kind of sticker isn’t welcome around here.” He completely ignored the stickers showing that I’m a combat veteran and a West Virginia resident.
Now, I generally try not to engage with ignorance, but I took exception to being accosted by a stranger for expressing my beliefs. So I told him, “This is my town — and you can go back to wherever you came from.” He grumbled and drove off. I finished pumping my gas.
And then it hit me:
This is my town.
This is my county.
This is my state.
And this is my country.
No one — especially not some angry passerby — gets to tell me I don’t belong here. I served this nation, I fought for it, and I will keep fighting for it every day.
Here’s the larger point: Democrats have spent too long on defense, especially in so-called “red” states like West Virginia. But we have every right to claim what is ours — our communities, our values, and our country. We need to stop whispering about our beliefs and start owning them.
We are the party of working families. The party of immigrants. The party of the disenfranchised. We are the party that still believes in the Constitution, in equal justice, and in a country that belongs to all of us — not just the loudest voices or the richest donors.
Yes, the Democratic Party has made mistakes. We’ve strayed too far into elitism, into speaking to each other instead of the people we represent. But that doesn’t have to be our future. It can’t be — not if we want to preserve the soul of our nation.
We are in an existential moment — one of the most dangerous periods in our country’s history since the Civil War. And we need to act like it. We must unite, organize, plan — and fight.
So to my fellow Democrats: This is our town. Our county. Our state. And our country.
And to former Democrats, disillusioned Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents — we need you. Let’s put aside our differences and come together in defense of the Constitution, democracy, and the promise of America.
