What We've Been Up To: The beginning of the end

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The beginning of the end

OF DIAPERS THAT IS!!! Yep folks, you guessed it...the little guy took his first attempt at the potty. All you non-moms/dads might not understand the excitement, but believe you me - Mommy was all aglow. He made his deposit in a big way and got loads of praise for a job well done. Granted, it took a little over a year from the time his sister started making attempts to the time she stopped wearing diapers, but I'll take what I can get. The light has begun to show at the end of the tunnel! Woo hoo!

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

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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The beginning of the end