Politics & Power Quote by Sam Brownback

Patriotism, in this formulation, doubles as a gentle reprimand. Brownback’s line wraps gratitude around a warning: the freedoms you enjoy are not only inherited, they’re being mishandled. The sentence is built to feel noncontroversial - who’s against honoring sacrifice? - but the real work happens in the phrase “easily take for granted.” That’s not a neutral observation; it’s a moral diagnosis aimed at the present.

As a politician, Brownback is using a familiar civic script to claim the emotional high ground without naming a policy. “Look back,” “how far we have come,” “as a people” collapses messy history into a single upward story, one that flatters the audience while steering them toward obedience: if progress is the nation’s arc, dissent can be recoded as ingratitude. The debt metaphor matters too. Debts demand repayment, and repayment usually takes the form of conduct - voting the “right” way, supporting the military, respecting institutions, or accepting limits framed as necessary for security. It’s a move that converts remembrance into leverage.

The context is the post-9/11 era political rhetoric Brownback frequently inhabited, where honoring service members and “freedom” became a versatile language for everything from foreign policy to domestic cultural battles. By keeping “those who fought valiantly” unspecified, the quote invites the listener to supply their preferred heroes - World War II, Vietnam, Iraq - and then smuggles in a broad injunction: your comfort rests on someone else’s hardship, so act accordingly. That’s how the line works: it feels like commemoration, but it’s also a quiet attempt to discipline the present.