The land I love is the farm where I grew up in Nebraska, where wagon trains once made their way across that land, the home of the brave pioneers.
It was August 1968. I was in Switzerland visiting friends of the family and enjoying the outstanding beauty of the country when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia with tanks. People who were working for my host family quickly returned to their own Czech homes. I don’t know what faced them there. But by God’s grace, I knew I was going home to the land of the free, my homeland of wheat and cornfields. That’s the point in my life when I realized how precious it was to be an American citizen, and ever since then I have voted in every election, stood for every passing flag, proudly recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and loudly sang the National Anthem, because I’m proud to be an American, and freedom isn’t free.