"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."

— Mark Twain

You ready for the Fourth tomorrow? The run, the Air Force flyover, the big parade, the pedestrian-jam lining the park, too much food, the satisfied gasps underneath the fireworks? At some point, maybe as you're listening to the annual reading of the Declaration of Independence at the band shell, you might even reflect on the character of our country, and what you and I have to do with it. From there it's a short step to the debate —sometimes that's a polite word for it — about "patriotism."

It's a conversation worth having this year. I'm not so interested in the version we've had almost every year since Vietnam, the one Mark Twain weighed in on much earlier, about how patriotism does or doesn't correlate with supporting government policy, particularly in times of war. All of us over a certain age have heard "My Country, Right or Wrong," and most of us came to learn how it was carefully sifted out of a less dogmatic quote, "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right." (Carl Schurz). It's not that this slice of the patriotism debate is settled or obsolete — it burns at the center of the fire of what it means to "support the troops" in Iraq. It's just that after all these years of hearing each other out, there's not much more to say.

So I want to celebrate this Fourth with a different take on patriotism. In a year when old institutions are failing with breathtaking speed, when just about everyone understands, willingly or not, that we can't live as extravagantly and consume as voraciously as we used to, when our habits and expectations plainly have to change, I think it's a good year to define patriotism as a commitment to be, in the old bumper sticker phrase, part of the solution instead of part of the problem. As much as anything these days, a true patriot is a true citizen. And maybe not just these days. More than 50 years ago Adlai Stevenson described a "patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime." Jefferson and Madison would have approved; here's a guy, I can imagine them saying, who gets what we've created.

This isn't abstract. Take two issues in front of the Congress right now: climate change and health care. The House just passed a "cap-and-trade" bill that fair-minded analysts (mostly) call the least disruptive, most corporate-friendly CO2 reduction approach that has a chance of working. Nobody's confident that it will make it through the Senate without more weakening amendments. How can that be, when growing majorities of American voters say they want serious action on climate change?

Maybe because we're short on patriotism. An interested news-watcher might say. "Come on. Can't these bozos say 'no' to Big Coal and Big Oil even when human survival's hanging in the balance?" and then turn to ESPN. But a citizen-patriot with Stevenson's "tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime" would be on his or her members of Congress like a dog on pork chops, joining others already out there with phone calls, e-mails, letters, visits to Capitol Hill offices and Town Hall meetings, until legislation that might actually reduce CO2 emissions reached the President's desk. Then if need be they'd hound him until the bill was signed.

The health care debate now spins around the "public option," which would let those dissatisfied with (or rejected by) the private market buy health insurance from a government-run company. National polls this week show almost three out of four Americans favoring the plan, but the latest expert guesswork says it won't happen. We've watched the President slowly slip from insisting on the proposal to hoping that it's part of a reform package, and insiders say that our own Senator Ron Wyden, who's supposedly carved himself a leadership role in health care reform, won't stand up for public option because it doesn't have the votes. Complete translation: Not enough people who say they care about this are bugging their members of Congress enough to peel them away from lobbyists pushing the other direction. Sounds to me like a shortage of patriotism.

For years I drove an old pickup with the bumper sticker "When the people lead, the leaders will follow." That's happened plenty of times, when enough people have pushed forward with the patriotism that democracy needs. It hasn't happened recently.

Lead on, patriots. Thank you. This Fourth's for you.

Jeff Golden is the author of "Forest Blood," "As If We Were Grownups" and the novel "Unafraid," with excerpts available at www.unafraidthebook.com.