What is an American?

As is the case with most Americans, I am a patriot to the core.  It is difficult for me not to get emotional about our great Country.  I cry when the National Anthem is played or when I see a flag draped coffin. Most of us Southerners are true red, white and blue.  Patriotism has been a part of our upbringing.  I am very happy it is so.  I visited Gettysburg battle field not long ago and it was a very emotional experience on a number of fronts.  As I walked the fields stained with blood I wondered what I would have done if I have lived in that time.  As I reflected on the war I thought, "certainly I would not have fought on the side of the South in such an unjust cause as slavery?"  But then I had to admit that I would have because I would have been caught up in the sentiments of the hour just as thousands of other Southern boys of that era.  This year Gettysburg celebrates it's 150th anniversary.  That may seem like a long time but really it isn't at all.  I grew up in the South just 84 years after the Civil War and I remember how fresh the war still seemed as a child. Yet,  to me World War I and World War II especially, put our men and women, North and South, in the same uniform on the same battlefields and while those wars were horrific, they served to forge us back into "one Nation under God". That reunification is a great blessing.  Many Nations around the world today still fester with the infection of past internal divisions.   Being forced together for survival makes a lot of prejudices disappear.  To answer the question, "What is an American", the answer must lie in the evidence produced by those who join in our cause of freedom.  During the last Great War all true Americans rose to the occasion and put aside personal issues to stand together.  The Southerner went to war and fought as an American.  The black man rose to the occasion and fought for a Country that would not allow him to order from a table in a "white restaurant".  That is a true American.  The Native American fought courageously for a Country that took his lush land and marched him to dusty reservations in the West and broke treaty after treaty.  That is a true American.  The Japanese American went off to war to fight for a Country who, while he was gone,  placed their relatives in internment camps because of their ancestry.  That is a true American.  I'm sure there are many others as well.

Today, our birthday as a Country, our Nation still struggles with our own diversity within.  May we continue to embrace those who love our Nation, enter her legally, pledge allegiance to her cause and stand ready to defend her as did all true Americans of the past.