The first time I came home from a trip to Latin America. After sitting in a one room, dirt floor house with a family my sister baptized on her mission down there, I came home and couldn't get over how much I have.

I live in American and got a great education, I have a good job, a stable family, and the gospel. Out of everyone in this world what are the odds that I'd be one of the few that ended up with all of that. I don't really understand why, but I'm grateful for it.

I try and go south of the border at least once a year, it keeps me from whining about my life.

After living overseas for many years, one of the most patriotic "events" I attended was getting through customs in the US and realize I was finally back in the Mother Land for good.

I was just about to say that.

Walking to the "US citizens" line for customs in New York, passing up miles and miles of non-citizens, was a surreal experience. I didn't realize until that point how much I appreciated what it means to be an American.

Whenever I think of patriotism, my mind goes back to an essay written by John Derbyshire where he excerpts from the book Under Two Dictators:


The book I had gone in search of was Margarete Buber’s Under Two Dictators. Buber was the wife of Heinz Neumann, a leading figure in the German Communist Party during the early 1930s. Buber herself was a Communist, too, of course. (And formerly the wife of Rafael, son of the theologian Martin Buber.) When Hitler came to power the couple had to run for their lives, and naturally they ran to Moscow. There they lived until Stalin’s great purge started up in 1937. Foreign communists were a special target of the purge, and in due course Neumann was pulled in. He was never heard of again. A short while later, Buber herself was arrested by the N.K.V.D. She spent the next two years in Soviet labor camps.

When Stalin and Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in September 1939, one of the subsidiary clauses allowed for an exchange of each other’s nationals. Russians who had fled to Germany to escape Stalin, and Germans who had fled to the U.S.S.R. to escape Hitler, were rounded up by the two dictators and repatriated. So having survived two years in Soviet camps, Buber now found herself in Ravensbrück. Miraculously, she survived that, too, and was still alive when the camp guards fled to avoid the advancing Red Army in 1945. (Of the hundred-odd German communists handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin in those exchanges, Buber is the only one known to have survived the war. The Russian “counter-revolutionaries” repatriated to the U.S.S.R. by Hitler fared even worse: they were all shot without ceremony.)

Having already tasted Stalin’s hospitality, Buber decided to head west herself. With a friend from the camp, she began the long walk to the Allied lines. The two women had only their camp rags to wear, and only such food as they could forage or beg on the way. Eventually, after several days’ walking, they came to the American lines at Bad Kleinem. Buber approached one of the G.I.s, a noncom, and told him that she and her friend had been five years in Ravensbrück. She added that she herself had previously been in a concentration-camp in Siberia, and that if the Russians caught her, she would be sent back there. “OK, sister,” said the G.I., “go through.” Joyfully, the women hurried through.

Then the G.I. called after them: “Hey, girls. Wait a minute.” Their hearts sinking, the two women followed him to a house with a sentry at the door. Obviously he was going to check with his superiors. Would they be sent back? Or something even worse? To grasp these women’s frame of mind at this point, you have to understand that for many years their everyday experience had taught them to expect nothing but the worst from men in uniform: an interrogation and beating if lucky, gang rape or a firing squad if not.
We waited in a fever of impatience. ... After a while he came out again with a tall, smiling officer, who looked at us, but said nothing. Our soldier went round behind the house. A few minutes later there was a sound of horse’s hooves and he drove out with a farm cart and pair.

“Get in,” he said. “You’ve walked enough by the look of you. You’re going to ride now.”

Scolpisci nella tua testa a lettere adamantine... Carve into your mind in great stone letters: This nation is the hope, and the conscience, of the world.

http://www.olimu.com/WebJournalism/2...LoveLetter.htm

7 am ward breakfast on July 4 with a short program, song and flag raising.

Ellis island. That was a very moving experience.

You folks are a bunch of cheaters. You were only supposed to list one.

Here are some more for me:

Ground zero
Pearl harbor memorial
Hiroshima peace park (ironically)
Returning to the US after any long foreign trip
Checkpoint Charlie
Dachau

JL-
You've been to some amazing places! I'm sure that every one of those places would send chills up your spine.

went to the Alamo to honor the Republic of Texas.

Mmm, yes, Dachau is a great one to list. I'd forgotten about that one. I've also been to Mauthausen down in Austria. Chilling, to say the least.