What We've Been Up To: The Wild Blue Yonder

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Wild Blue Yonder

I love me some soldiers. I love that they risk their lives to protect a way of life that most people take for granted (including me sometimes). I love that my dad was in the Navy and that I have family now serving and that my son wants to be a soldier when he grows up. It is no wonder then that when I get a chance to attend a military air show that I attempt to make time if possible. This year we got to go to the March Air Reserve base's airshow with some friends and it was awesome. We showed up just in time to see the Patriot jets fly in formation all over the skyscape above us and also got to see a plane that can hover in mid-air, a water drop demonstration, lots of trick fliers and the culmination was an impressive show by the Thunderbirds. It was sunny and warm and we a perfect day spent with family, exposing our kids to the lives that protect us on a daily basis.

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, May 22, 2012

The Wild Blue Yonder