An Epiphany of Sorts

Some people who read this Blog know that I was not born in the United States. And I ask you, dear reader, to indulge me for this one post. Or, you could ignore the whole thing and wait for the next one.

On December 10, 1915, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at a gathering of the Knights of Columbus at which he said,

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. 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.”

Now you may wonder if I’m about to launch another assault on the subject of illegal immigration but I‘m not.

What I am going to do is to personalize the sentiment expressed by Teddy and this all really crept into my consciousness slowly but in the last few weeks it blossomed with a bang and I’ll attempt to tell you how and why.

A few weeks ago, I picked up European friends from the airport and we went for dinner on the way home. As I know Arizona law, I did not take my trusty Glock 23 into the restaurant but left it in my car. Perhaps predictably, one of the people demanded to know why I was armed.

Now, just saying that I was exercising my Second Amendment right wouldn’t have cut it so I ignored the inherent barb even though I do hold a Concealed Carry Permit.

I knew that the issue was unlikely to be left there and would be raised again with the implicit scorn of European “superiority”.

Even so, it was with no glee that I read of the gunman in England who yesterday killed 12 and wounded many more before turning the weapon on himself. On the phone later my friend protested that no one would weed their front yard with a firearm strapped to their hip, so what use would more lenient ownership legislation serve.

Well, actually I would if I’d already heard that a crazed killer was on the loose in my neighborhood.

But this is the modern European mindset. It is the same mindset that, when asked who was primarily responsible for his safety stated that, it was the police.

You have only to look at the mess in Greece to see that Europeans, by and large, want to turn to government for everything and the sad thing is so far they can. My friends extolled all the programs they were receiving and couldn’t understand my opposition based on the fact that I wanted to know who was paying for them.

There were several more issues which divided us but none more than this, perhaps best exemplified by the following.

On June 11, the soccer World Cup competition starts in South Africa and the very next day the United States is pitted against England. I will be rooting for my country, these United States and that will be regarded as treasonous by some.

Put bluntly, Teddy was right then and he’s still right now.