Happy 250th America!

When I was a kid, two of my favorite things were globes of the world and coins. I loved learning about different countries and cultures around the world and helping my mom count her tips from waitressing at the end of the day. My favorite coin was the 1976 Bicentennial quarter with the drummer on the back. Though I am too young to remember the Bicentennial celebration, I have always loved celebrating Independence Day on the Fourth of July and remembering what it represents. This month the United States of America is celebrating the semiquincentennial or the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The United States is also hosting the majority of the 2026 FIFA World Cup soccer games in cities across the country.

With these two major events coinciding, many news reports and videos have shown individuals from around the world sharing their experiences visiting cities across the United States. People from many foreign countries have expressed how much they enjoyed their experience and their surprise as to how much better the United States and its citizens are compared to how they are portrayed in the news and media of their home country. Among other things they have shared how much they loved the food, how kind and friendly the people are, and how many more options there are for shopping and eating compared to where they come from.

Hearing these experiences reminded me of stories my wife has shared from the time when she volunteered to work as an interpreter for Russian speaking refugees who fled to the United States from Armenia and Azerbaijan after the fall of the Soviet Union. One experience in particular was when the people she was helping walked into a grocery store and were overwhelmed by the number of available items in the store. For the first time in their lives they had options to choose from. Living in the Soviet Union they had never been given a choice of what type of bread or what flavor of jam to buy, if there was even any available.

With so many of the world’s citizens exclaiming their enjoyment, I have been reminded of many individuals I’ve met in both my personal and business life who have come to the United States to build a better life in a land that provided opportunities their home country could not, or would not, provide. Now I would like to share some tidbits of people and their stories, many who fled due to war or other turmoil. There are people all around us who have amazing stories to share about why they are so grateful for this country.

There are my neighbors including one from Ghana whose father was killed in Liberia in the 1980s by the rebel warlord Charles Taylor. Then there is a couple from Ukraine, one whose family fled when the Soviet Union first fell, and the other whose family became refugees at the time of the recent Russia-Ukraine war. During my college days I met a woman from Iran whose family converted to Christianity in the late 1970s and fled to the United States in the early 1980s.

Then there are those impacted by World War II. I became friends with two different German women, one who fled the Russians as they brutally attacked the Eastern front, and another who was raised as one of the Hitler Youth and whose family’s property was confiscated and used as a military outpost, first by the Nazis and later by the Americans. I’ve met multiple men who fought on opposite sides including a man who fought in the German army and a British Royal Air Force pilot who flew a Mosquito in combat against the Germans. On my wall at home in a picture box hangs an origami doll made and gifted to me by a woman from Japan who lost her hearing as a young girl, working for 2 hours every morning before school in a factory manufacturing silk thread for Imperial Japanese Army uniforms.

I befriended a number of Hungarians who fled during the 1956 revolution, including a couple who met each other in a drugstore in Denver after they immigrated. I also knew a Hungarian man who initially stayed during that revolution and later became a Soviet military officer until he finally risked his life and the lives of his family escaping from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, defecting first to Brazil then finally reaching America.

I’ve spoken with multiple POWs and concentration camp survivors. These include a man who as a young teenager was forced by the Soviets to work in uranium mines in Russia before escaping and making his way to the USA. I’ve had conversations with military personnel captured by the Germans including a Two-Star Polish General, as well as a woman who as a young girl was imprisoned and brutalized by the Nazis along with her family because her newspaper reporter father opposed Hitler. I was brought to tears when I shook a man’s hand and saw with my own eyes a tattoo of numbers on his forearm. He was a young boy in a concentration camp and was the only member of his family to survive. Then there was the man who with broken English shared how he had been in the South Vietnamese army and survived, barely, 5 years in a reeducation camp after the communists took over.

Others from Vietnam I have known include a farmer who was nearly 60 years old when he and his daughter narrowly escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat as well as members of the Hmong community who became refugees in America because they had aided the US and South Vietnamese during the war. For many years, Vietnamese immigrants remembered the time they finally made it to America so fondly that they incorporated the year their family arrived in the United States into their restaurant names. All of these people became American citizens.

Finally, I want to honor my wife’s grandfathers, one who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, the other who lost his leg on the beach at Normandy; my uncle who I am named after who was killed in Vietnam; and my father-in-law who survived Vietnam, along with all the other men and women who have served to protect the freedom and liberty we enjoy. I am grateful for this country which allowed the child of a welder and a waitress, the step-son of a truck driver and a cake decorator, to establish a successful, independent hearing aid business.