Enes Kanter is a professional basketball player, one of the few hundred best in the world who play in the National Basketball Assocation.

But that is only the surface part of his story.

He also is a recently naturalized American citizen who feels so strongly about the ideals of his adopted country that he has added Freedom to his name.

His sneakers don’t carry protestations and statements about the flaws of his new country. Rather, they carry messages of liberty and independence.

Swiss-born and a Turkish citizen most of his life, he has seen what a dictatorship and denial of basic human rights looks like and appreciates the specialness of the United States. He has witnessed a regime that has persecuted, jailed and tortured tens of thousands of educators, lawyers, judges, public officials and activists. His father was jailed in Turkey and he has not been able to speak with his parents since 2015.

He says when Turkey’s dictator came after he and his family, the United States embraced him.

And he embraced the country back — its language, norms and traditions — and recently became an American citizen.

He has called out Lebron James for the hypocrisy of calling America racist while not calling attention to rampant human rights violations in China. He has criticized the NBA for carrying on a nearly incestuous marketing relationship with China despite those human rights violations.

Tamyra Mensah-Stock is a female wrestler, one of the few hundred best in the world good enough to compete in the Olympics.

But her Gold Medal — the first by an American Black woman in wresting — is only the surface part of her story.

Instead of using her medal-winning platform to express disdain for her country, she chose to honor it and God.

In an era when athletes are kneeling during National Anthems, she wrapped herself in the flag and bragged about the joy of living in the United States.

She is using some of her Olympic prize money to buy a food truck — “The Lady Bug” — for her mother, whom she says has been understandably struggling since her father was tragically killed in a car accident while driving home from one of her matches.

The stories of Kanter and Mensah-Stock stand out at a time when the narrative is that this country is nothing special and smelling of racism.

Apparently Kanter and Mensah-Stock, two people whose athleticism is only one ingredient of who they are, did not get the memo.

So what do they see and feel about this country that so many of their fellow Americans do not? And why do those poles-apart perceptions exist in such a large measure these days?

Part of the explanation is that they have seen the worst of what life and truly inhumane government have to offer. They know this country, for all its faults, is so much better than that. They have experienced the people that live in it and know that the few who choose to demonize the place where they live do not represent the many they have met.

As for the wildly extreme perceptions of this country among the citizenry, each of us has a choice to make. And, quite frankly, that choice is flavored by such good fortune that we don’t understand how good we have it to live in this place at this time. So we pinpoint an isolated circumstance and decide that’s reflective of most of us and our country’s reality. That’s easy to do, particularly at a time when so many influencers are trafficking negative perceptions that serve their particular agenda.

As for me — and Enes and Tamyra — we are going to pin our perception of this country and its people on a lifetime of experiences, which have overwhelmingly reflected person-to-person goodness and a national specialness.

On a day and in a season when people of multiple faiths regenerate hope from the things they believe in, we should all lean into the way Enes Kanter Freedom and Tamyra Mensah-Stock have used their experiences to shape how they feel about the country they live in.

Their testimony of gratitude and actions that reflect it are a special gift that is desperately needed these days.

Merry Christmas, Enes and Tamyra.

David F. Troisi retired as editor of the Sun-Gazette. None of the opinions expressed necessarily represent the views of the Sun-Gazette.