What We've Been Up To: Girlfriends

Monday, August 27, 2012

Girlfriends

When we got back from our cruise to Alaska recently (what, I didn't blog that yet? Okay, maybe soon), my princess stopped in Seattle and bought a bunch of special beads for five of her bestest girlfriends. She picked out special charms for each of them and invited them all over once we got home so that they could spend an afternoon playing together and catching up after a summer apart. They were all so sweet and well mannered that it just reminded me how lucky us moms all are to have raised this beautiful group of girlfriends. I hope that in 12 years we will have an almost identical picture of the same girls all loving on each other the way they do now. FYI - the date stamp is off on my camera, don't judge me, I have other priorities.

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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Monday, August 27, 2012

Girlfriends