Sally Gimon

I'm very proud to be American. I'm a first generation, second generation, and third generation person, and all my family is so proud to be Americans. My father was the first person to go to college in his family. He served 27 years in the active military, and he taught us so much to do. I personally could not join the military because of very poor eyesight, so instead I was a Peace Corps volunteer from 91 to 93 in eastern Poland.

One major difference between Polish high school students aged 15 to 19 versus American high school students was that Americans can make their own decisions on their own. I used to give my students three different topics they had to choose one to write, and for the first four weeks, every single student wrote all three topics, and I failed them. They were shocked by that.

Do you know what our freedoms mean to me? We can go where we want, vote the way we want, talk the way we want, and do whatever we need to do. I appreciate this opportunity to talk about what it means to be an American.

My mom, who came from Ireland, she left Ireland at age 16 to go to London to become a nurse. She got her American citizenship when I was five years old. I remember going to her swearing-in ceremony, and she was so proud of that. My grandmother, who was born in what's present-day Slovakia but was Prussia, I still have her birth certificate that was written in Cyrillic Slavic, a dead language. She came to the United States when she was four years old, and she said she would never go back.

This country has given my family the opportunity, the time, and the education to do what we want. I invested in real estate, and I started my own business in March of 2020, and I've never looked back. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about what it means to be an American. This is a beautiful country.