AMERICAN FLYER Cleared for Takeoff

I do a lot of writing and I especially like political commentary. I've had letters in newspapers all across the country and even had an editorial article in the Denver Post once. But my e-mail audience is limited to those in my address book and whomever they sometimes forward my missives to. Someone suggested I start a blog to increase my audience range.

So this is it. I don't know anything about blogs, so I'll be experimenting as I go. If I gain a following it will be great. Maybe it will lead to something more. If I don't, it will be great because I'm enjoying this already, and it will give me a place to archive what I write.

Why the name? American, because this is about the country I love, and Flyer, because I was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps and Navy for eleven years. The title rather identifies me I think. I am proud to be an American, I am grateful to have been one of the "few and the proud," and I am humbled to have served this great nation of ours.

I have lived fifteen years of my life outside of the United States and been in fourteen different countries. I'm not a world traveler by any means, but I've seen plenty. I've seen the corruption of third world banana republics, lived through a revolution and felt the anxiety of being cut off from outside help by riots that almost led to a civil war. I've seen people so poor that if they had fifty cents to buy a bag of maize meal to make a dry, tasteless cake for their family they called it a good day. I've lived where the police are so corrupt that they are a terror to innocent citizens rather than protectors of the public safety. I've given food to street kids, dirty, unloved, abandoned, and hooked on glue. I've experienced cultures where when a white man walks by people automatically stick their hands out hoping for a gift.

The first time I landed in the Philippines and saw the poverty, the dirty water, houses with nothing more than cardboard walls and rusty corrugated tin roofs, and squatters living in houses built on stilts over an open, stinking sewage ditch, I determined that no matter how bad my economic situation might become in the States, I would still be thankful for the privilege of being born an American. At the risk of being trite, there simply is no place like home.

In 1972 John Wayne made a record called, "America, Why I Love Her." On the first track he asks the question, "You ask me why I love her?" Then he answers, "Well give me time and I'll explain. Have you seen a Kansas sunset, or an Arizona rain?" He answers with a series of questions and goes on to describe the beauty of America from coast to coast and north to south. He concludes by asking again, "You ask me why I lover her?" Then he answers it, "I have a million reasons why. My beautiful America, beneath God's wide, wide sky."

It has been my pleasure to have set foot in 49 of the 50 States. The only place I haven't been is Idaho, but I flew over Hell's Canyon once in a corporate jet at 41,000 feet, so you might say I've invaded Idaho's airspace. Everywhere I've gone I've seen the beauty of a land that God has blessed like no other. And make no mistake about it, it is the Christian God, the same one that our Founders worshipped, that has blessed and made America great, not any other.

My intent as I launch this blog is to remind us, among other things, that we were a Christian nation in the beginning, and the best thing that could possibly happen to us would be for the nation as a whole to return to the roots of our heritage and become a Christian nation once again. Visit as often as you like and tell your friends about AMERICAN FLYER, and let's celebrate our wonderful country. To God be the glory.

Lance Patterson