What We've Been Up To: My Little Soldier

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

My Little Soldier

Recently my youngest child turned four. Oh my goodness...[sigh] FOUR. Well, he has been requesting a soldier birthday for almost a year now so what could I do but oblige his request. We played "search and rescue" to find hidden soldiers, "sergeant says", ran the kids through a basic training obstacle course, painted our faces with camo face paint, wore our camouflage and dog tags, got tattoos, played target shooting on the range with the rubber band gun, ate some ribs and other barbecue, tried to land planes on an aircraft carrier, whacked at an enemy tank with a bat until it turned over all of it's candy and then finished the day off with a huge water balloon fight. There were about 40 people there throughout the day and it was beautiful weather for a barbecue. I was so busy that I didn't get many pictures of the festivities, but here's a shot of my little camo man and me trying to finish up making his tank birthday cake.

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, July 12, 2011

My Little Soldier