What We've Been Up To: All Better

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

All Better

My little man is finally feeling 100% again. For those of you out of the loop, he had a staph infection in his lymph node on his neck (that became a lump the size of a golf ball) and had to have surgery to drain it. We noticed it at his 1st birthday party (see below). His neck is not turned in the picture, it really was that big and quadrupled in size before they finally decided the antibiotics weren't working (stupid doctors). 4 days in the hospital (where a nurse accidentally pulled out the drain, stupid nurse), a soft muscle tissue growth from the wound that they thought was a tumor (stupid doctors) and now two months of recovery later and finally there is virtually no scab and only probably a little scar. He got his first bath this morning in the tub, complete with hair washing and his fun big sister, much to his delight. Thank goodness because I was getting tired of the 'ol sponge bath routine. He handled it all with virtually no issue at all. What can I say, the kid is a trooper.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt