Perri Nelson's Website 

I am an American - and proud of it!

I have been an American since the day I was conceived. It is completely an accident of birth that I, the person writing this, am an American. It is undeserved, I was given no choice in the matter. This is the case for roughly four percent of the world's population (about twelve and a half percent of the U.S. population is foreign born), so I'm not unique in this in any way. Nevertheless, I am proud to be an American, and have been for most of my life — the part of my life where I have been able to give it consideration at all.

What gives me the right to be proud of my country, the country of my accidental birth? Well, for one thing, it's a free country. I may not have been given the choice to be born here, but every day of my adulthood I have had the opportunity, should I choose to take it to leave and choose a different country. Although I am an American citizen, I do not have to be. Being able to choose not to be an American, I am also free to choose to remain an American, and I do. Having made that conscious choice I can honestly say that I am proud to be an American, and not simply an accidental American.

When I say “I am an American” I mean that I am a citizen of the United States of America, and not merely an occupant of either the North or South American continents. A citizen of Mexico, or Canada, or Colombia may be able to rightly claim that they are an American too, but not in the way I mean it, and not in the way that many people understand it when they hear someone say that they are an American. Americans, that is citizens of the United States of America, are sometimes accused of arrogance when we take the name in this way.

To that, I say “phooey”. A citizen of Brazil might take offense in my calling myself an American as if he were not, but a citizen of Brazil (the first region in the world to be called "America") is a Brazilian. A citizen of Mexico is a Mexican. A citizen of Ecuador is an Ecuadorian. I am not offended when citizens of Canada call themselves Canadians, I refuse to acknowledge the offense taken by someone at my calling myself an American. What else am I supposed to call myself, a “United Statesian”? A “Yankee”? Try that one on in Georgia or South Carolina — it just won't fly.

We've called ourselves Americans for a long time. The world knows what we mean. If we go to France and say “I am an American” most people know that we mean we are from the United States. Only those choosing to either take or to give offense would reply, “From which country?”

I am not a hyphenated-American, I am an American. I'm deeply offended by people that have to refer to themselves as hyphenated-Americans. By African-Americans that have never been to Africa. By German-Americans whose families have been American citizens for generations. Some of my ancestors were Germans. When they immigrated to the United States, they were still Germans. When they became citizens of the United States they became Americans — not German-Americans. This practice of keeping some regional designator as a part of your identity and using it to become a hyphenated-American smack of arrogance, condescension and separatism to me, as well as a disdain for ordinary Americans that is simply intolerable. I recently read a quote from a famous American President on the third world county website, and it expresses my feelings so well that I went out to find the full quotation…

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 (Before Knights of Columbus, New York City, October 12, 1915.)

“We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.” “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.”

Fortunately for those poor slobs that think that they owe allegiance to some other nationality or race before they owe allegiance to the country of their citizenship, the United States is a free country. It's unfortunate for the rest of us that they think that they owe allegiance to anything else before their country. It's sad that to them, expressing a love for your country is reduced to “jingoistic” “patriotism”.

I am proud to be an American. Ours is not the first Democracy the world has seen (in fact, contrary to popular opinion, it's not a Democracy), nor the first Republic, but it is founded upon solid principles of representative yet limited government. Our Constitution is a concrete, written document that narrowly defines the powers and responsibilities of our government.

Q. Why has our Constitution been classed as "rigid"?
A. The term "rigid" is used in opposition to "flexible" because the provisions are in a written document which cannot be legally changed with the same ease and in the same manner as ordinary laws. The British Constitution, which is unwritten, can, on the other hand, be changed overnight by act of Parliament.

Our Constitution is a source of pride for Americans, and rightly so. Even the heads of foreign nations have recognized this, such as the British Liberal Party Prime Minister William E Gladstone.

The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

Our Constitution doesn't pretend to give us our rights… it merely guarantees them. It serves not to merely define and constitute a government, it limits that government, and protects us from it. I am proud of the Constitution of the United States and happy to pledge my allegiance to the Country whose founders authored it.

I am proud to be an American.

Contrary to the opinions of some, our nation was not founded upon slavery and the oppression of the black race. I am not ashamed of my country's history. While it is a fact that slavery existed in the thirteen States that became the United States at its birth, it is also a fact that the people of my country fought their bloodiest war ever to end the practice of slavery within its borders. I am proud that great Americans recognized the evil of slavery for what it was and sacrificed their lives (over 618,000 of them, more than in all other United States wars, from the Revolution through Viet Nam combined.)

Put into perspective, roughly one out of every fifty people in living in the United States at the time gave their lives in that epic American struggle to abolish slavery. Over three out of every five of those lives were Union soldiers, fighting to preserve the Union and to abolish slavery. Slavery is a vile stain upon humanity's record, and not merely the record of the United States. The United States was not alone in its exploitation of slaves, nor only the white race (African Blacks sold their own people and the peoples of other African tribes into slavery, for example), but American blood was spilled to put an end to it. Today no civilized person condones nor practices slavery. I am proud of the American blood that was spilled to put a stop to this vile and barbaric practice.

I am proud to be an American.

I am proud because my country stands for freedom and liberty, not merely within her own borders but abroad as well. We are a nation reluctant to go to war, and yet when freedom and liberty are threatened go to war we will. This isn't imperialism — despite what some may say. We don't go to war to acquire new territories and we don't go to war to make vassal states of the nations that we seek to liberate or to defend. It is not our goal in Afghanistan or Iraq to acquire those nations as territories or vassals of the United States, instead we liberated their peoples from tyrants. Their governments were established by their own people, and are maintained by their own people. We do have an ongoing military presence in those nations, but that presence is there in support of the legitimate governments of those nations. It is there to fight international terrorism and insurgencies that would see those nations fail. The situation is no different that that in post World War II Europe or Japan.

In fact, we still have a military presence in Europe. A large portion of our military is based in Germany, so large a portion that in part Germany's economy is dependant upon our presence there. One could hardly argue though that Germany, Japan, or France are part of an American Empire. All three of those nations owe their current existence and the liberties enjoyed by their current populations to the belief of Americans in liberty and freedom. Together with the people of Great Britain, America's Greatest Generation, in the words of Tom Brokaw, liberated France from the oppression of the Nazis, defeated and rebuilt Nazi Germany and broke the Japanese empire, rebuilding each of those nations as free democracies. The United States has no say in how those nations governments are run today — and no interest in it other than a desire to see the people of those nations remain free and at liberty.

We are not an empire, we are lovers of freedom and liberty, and I am proud of America for it.

I could go on and on. There are so many reasons to be proud of America that space simply doesn't allow me to go into them all in one posting.

I refuse to be bullied or cowed. The left may not be proud of this nation, seeing fault in every moment of its history, but I refuse to accept that world view.

I am an American, and thank God for it!

God Bless America!