What We've Been Up To: My Awesome Nephew

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

My Awesome Nephew

My new nephew is just an awesome miracle. We were delighted to get to meet him and see him get baptized recently. The pastor did a great job of speaking and when he finished with the water and blessing, the little guy (my nephew, not the pastor) raised his fist in the air as if to shout "Halleluiah!" It was just precious. We all retired from the church, back to the house for some catching up with friends and family in the beautiful sunny weather God planned for my nephew's big day. The older my children get, the more I realize how very fleeting those precious moments are and try to appreciate them whenever I can take a snapshot in my brain. My nephew's fist in the air after being baptized is definitely one of my snapshots.

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 23, 2013

My Awesome Nephew