What We've Been Up To: San Clemente

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

San Clemente

I have lived in Southern California (and Bend, Oregon - shout out!) for 15 years now. FIFTEEN. If you count college, it's nineteen. That's a long, long time. So it was surprising to many that I had never camped at any of the San Diego beach campgrounds. It becomes more understandable when you realize that in order to stay at these campgrounds, you must call at 8 AM, when the campground opens, seven months before you wish to camp. SO, calculating backwards, since we stayed in June, that means we reserved our campsite back in the wee hours of the morning, the first of December 2012. It sold out in under 5 minutes. We got an awesome site where we were literally on the cliff, overlooking the waves.

So we rappelled down off of our mountain last June and spent the weekend with two of our favorite families. There were eleven of us total so I'll let you figure out how we all fit in one vehicle on the way to and from town. There was so much fun had, with riding bikes, digging in the sand, playing wiffle ball, and relaxing that I forgot to take many pictures. But here is a shot of the mommies, getting a little break together, while the daddies took the munchkins fishing off the pier.

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