Au contraire, dear Mr. Patriot Talk Radio Guy--poor, poor me. After listening to only a minute of your sickening tripe, I felt like running to the bathroom to throw up.

Perhaps I felt even worse because you were invading my peaceful little home-away-from home where I was spending the Christmas holidays. My brother lives in the nearby town of Liebenthal, which is a beautiful old German word that means "valley of love." You can look it up, Mr. Patriot Talk Radio Guy. My ancestors founded that town in 1876, and at the time they were unwelcome immigrants, too. In an editorial published in the Hays City Sentinel in August of 1876, the paper's owners complained about how terrible my peasant forebears smelled. Their lack of knowledge of English was duly noted. Their overall personal habits and lifestyle, the writers opined, made them more like "the aboriginese" (sic) than any previous group of people to arrive in the area. I guess that made them a whole lot worse than all the decent, law-abiding gunslingers, dance hall girls, buffalo hunters, and railroad workers who were Hays' original settlers.

But let's get back to Liebenthal, founded by Germans from Russia in 1876. Let me tell you a little about some of the citizens which that small town eventually produced. There was, for example, my grandpa, who was born there in 1896 and later was drafted for service in WWI. During training at Camp Funston, his captain regularly called him into his office to ask Grandpa how he could possibly be trusted to go shoot his "brothers in Germany." It didn't matter how many times Grandpa told him he was an American born in America with brothers that were born in America, too. Grandpa still had his German name and spoke his English with the German accent of his parents, so his captain's skepticism never abated. In the end Grandpa's true loyalties became a moot point, however, because the Spanish flu felled him before he could be sent abroad to fight. That did not spare another Liebenthal boy his age, though, from being killed in France while fighting in the United States Army. Later, WWII and the Korean War would claim the lives of additional native sons. To this day their graves are easy to find in the town cemetery because Liebenthal's war dead are buried with honors second only to those given its beloved Catholic priests.

Then there were those Liebenthalers who survived the wars in which they fought but lost a big part of their souls in the process. One retired WWII veteran became a friend of my brother's back in the 1970s. His assignments in the war had been especially demanding. Because he could speak the same German dialect that had been passed down from father to son ever since his family's 1876 arrival in Liebenthal, he was sent directly into Germany to do undercover assassinations. He wore a Nazi military uniform and blended in with the locals. During this time, he saw and did things no one should ever have to see and do.

"The man who came back from the war was not the same man I married," his wife said of him years later, sadly. For the rest of his postwar life, his marriage was troubled. He was troubled. After his retirement from a career with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, he and my brother sometimes would take walks around Liebenthal. Sometimes he suddenly he would stop and stare at a neighbor's large barn. Then he would say, "You know, in Germany I saw buildings that big stuffed with dead bodies from top to bottom."

When the old man died, he was buried with full military honors. Because his wife was no longer living, the American flag that draped his coffin was presented to his oldest daughter. She had gone away to college, earned a PhD in psychology, married well, raised a family, and found meaningful professional work. She was living the American dream and she knew it. Yet, she later confessed, when that flag was presented to her at her father's funeral, she felt like ripping it to shreds. Her country, she said, had taken her father away from her long before his death ever did.

Perhaps on some level the child of a returning soldier knows even better than his wife does: this man is not the same man we once knew. He is not the same husband, not the same father. Yet it's people like this war veteran's family for whom the word patriot genuinely means something. It is a large, expansive term easily said in the same breath as others like it, words like love and sacrifice. It is ill at ease, on the other hand, in the company of ugly words like hate and bigotry.

A year or two ago I heard a Liebenthal native say how bad he feels about the prejudice sometimes directed against the new Mexican immigrants arriving in our area. He said that some of the rude comments people make remind him of how it was growing up during a time when he never got to play on high school sports teams because he was German and "they didn't want Germans on their teams."

Now there's a real patriot talking. Only I bet you two bits that "The Patriot" would never let him say that on one of their shows.