"May your saddest tomorrow be no worse, then your happiest yesterday!"
God Bless America!
I received this from my dear friend Lynn. She is a great fan of the late Ann Landers. Ann Landers would print this every 4th of July. I hope you read this as I am sure it means a lot more, in light of recent events!
I Am The Nation
by Otto Whittaker
I was born on July 4, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence is my
birth certificate. The bloodlines of the world run in my veins, because I
offered freedom to the oppressed. I am many things and many people. I am the
nation. I am 250 million living souls, and the ghost of millions who have
lived and died for me. I am Nathan Hale and Paul Revere. I stood at
Lexington and fired the shot heard around the world. I am Washington,
Jefferson and Patrick Henry. I am John Paul Jones, the Green Mountain Boys
and Davy Crockett. I am Lee and Grant and Abe Lincoln. I remember the Alamo,
the Maine and Pearl Harbor. When freedom called, I answered and stayed until
it was over, over there. I left my heroic dead in Flanders Field, on
the rock of Corregidor, on the bleak slopes of Korea and in the steaming
jungle of Vietnam. I am the Brooklyn Bridge, the wheat lands of Kansas
and the granite hills of Vermont. I am the coal fields of the Virginias and
Pennsylvania, the fertile lands of the West, the Golden Gate and the Grand
Canyon. I am Independence Hall, the Monitor and the Merrimac. I am
big. I sprawl from the Atlantic to the Pacific, my arms reach out to embrace
Alaska and Hawaii. I am more than five million farms. I am forest, field,
mountain and desert. I am quiet villages, and cities that never sleep.
You can look at me and see Ben Franklin walking down the streets of
Philadelphia with his bread loaf under his arm. You can see Betsy Ross with
her needle. You can see the lights of Christmas and hear the strains of
"Auld Lang Syne" as the calendar turns. I am Babe Ruth and the World
Series. I am 110,000 schools and colleges and 330,000 churches where
my people worship God as they think best. I am a ballot dropped into a box,
the roar of a crowd in a stadium and the voice of a choir in a cathedral. I
am an editorial in a newspaper and a letter to a congressman. I am Eli
Whitney and Stephen Foster. I am Tom Edison, Albert Einstein and Billy
Graham. I am Horace Greeley, Will Rogers and the Wright Brothers. I am
George Washington Carver, Jonas Salk and Martin Luther King Jr. I am
Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and Thomas Paine. Yes,
I am the nation, and these are the things that I am. I was conceived in
freedom and, God willing, in freedom I will spend the rest of my days. May I
possess always the integrity, the courage and the strength to keep
myself unshackled, to remain a citadel of freedom and a beacon of hope to
the world!
