Happy Thanksgiving
I wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving, but most especially, my prayers today are for those whose loved ones are deployed in foreign fields in service to this country.
I read the comments on this blog and see many people ready to despair at the state of the nation. I read some of the experts too and hear them predicting the end of the west. I think there is something wrong with this. I really do. No one knows the future. That’s why hope is one of three great virtues: it’s a natural by-product of honest humility. We have been through very tough, even desperate, times before, some within my own memory, and we have always come through. That’s no guarantee we’ll come through again, but who said you get a guarantee? The only real guarantee is that if you give up, you fail. As long as young men are willing to fight in the field, offering up their life’s blood for the things this country stands for, what right have any of the rest of us to throw up our hands? Let me answer that for you to save you some brainwork: We have no right at all.
I have a friend, an old Reagan hand, famed for his political optimism. He’s still predicting McCain will win the last election! Once, recently, in a worried moment, I said to him, “What do you think will happen?” He shrugged happily and said, “Good guys win.”
Let it be so. Let us make it so. Never surrender.
Happy Thanksgiving.
AK, where are the videos? Since you started working for you don’t seem to have done any. I for one miss them.
As a veteran of this country’s Marine Corps, I’ll say this: we’ll win. We’ll win because we badly want to. We’ll win because we don’t see any other option. And we’ll win because of the best reason of all; we’re right.
Well said Andrew. People have been predicting the end of the West and the US for a long time. But what they forget is that we are the one culture that has the mechanisms for self-correction and renewal. On another note – I just gave a copy of your Last Thing I Remember to my next door neighbor’s 11 year old boy. He is a good young man and I thought of him immediately once I started reading the books. I loved the series and am looking forward to the TV version. Happy Thanksgiving from a soldier.
Speaking of the whole optimism vs pessimism issue, check this out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opinion/kristof-are-we-getting-nicer.html?_r=1
Quick quote from the book referenced in that article:
“Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.
Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.”
Klaven Klaven Klaven, dude dude dude-dude-dude. Don’t you know that 2011 has sucked even worse than 20212? well? Don’t you know it’s all hopeless?
Hey if I had my way, I’d make sure the populace was taxed into near slavery with local state and national taxes siphoning off at least half of what everyone works so hard to produce, until they start to squeal like a pig, then I’d jack their taxes up another fifty percent to show them who’s boss, and enrich my place, status and position at their expense through incumbency and by mongering perpetual ‘crises’ until they were all blue in the face!
I’ll also have you know, I eat sleep and go to the bathroom in this same corner, and if you don’t think that’s pitiful, then well, you just don’t have a heart!
I’m the new new mug of the new new democrat party, and you can get someone else to clean up this mess, and spend millions on police and firefighters when I come back again after it warms up again next Spring.
Til then, happy crappy holidays you freak!
Yours,
the always optimistic Eore.
P.S. It’s twenty to twelve, do you know where you’re tax dollars are?
PeePeeSS. Also, because of foul winter cold weather cause by Global Warming™, Occupy Wall Street™ has been re-named “Occupy Mall Street™”.
Please assemble in the new new appropriate places.
that is all.
for the moment.