Giving Thanks for America’s Wonderful Life
Every Thanksgiving I put a lock on my pecan pies until the entire family is gathered round for our annual viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life. Watching this all-American Christmas classic with me is the price I exact for my feastly labors. And in a family where I’m the only living soul with cooking skills above a turn-on-the-microwave-first-grader, I know — every single year — that this sentimental indulgence of mine is a done deal.
George Bailey’s story is by now so intimately known by our family and by hosts of other ordinary Americans that it’s hard to imagine it still has any appeal worth two hours and ten minutes of precious time. Oh, but it has.
We meet George Bailey in the throes of a suicidal breakdown. His dilemma revolves around missing money belonging to his humble family’s small-town building and loan business. George is so distraught over what will happen to his wife, children, family business, and his employees if the missing funds cause him to go to jail that he has determined his life insurance policy makes him more valuable dead than alive.
If there were such a thing as life insurance for a nation facing ignominious financial ruin, America herself might be having a “George Bailey” moment right about now.
Here we are, a downgraded-nearly-to-junk nation, facing off with our own quite-possible demise. And modern America seems to have produced far more folks with Mr. Potter’s greedy bent than the morally upright George Baileys.
Right in our midst, we see scores of our fellow citizens who seem to think America’s Wonderful Life isn’t even worth preserving.
This is so sad. If only America could have the intervention of a guardian angel to show us all a world as it might have been without our aid and comfort through the past 250 years.
Those who run madly into the streets, denouncing American capitalism, have lost sight of all the good this system has done to bring common people the world over a standard of living unimaginable for former generations of earthly inhabitants.
America’s Wonderful Life has blessed oh-so-many lives.
What is to become of modern civilization if we Americans throw in the towel on the ideals of liberty and individual dignity, and stop believing that these are worth the suffering required to protect them? How can it be that young Americans do not see the bountiful blessings bestowed upon the rest of the world by us?
Our creative people, free to indulge their unique curiosities, have invented so many life-improving things that it is impossible to catalog them all. While talented inventors have certainly sprung from every other nation, it has been the unique American way of life that inspired making things efficiently and cheaply enough that most of the world’s inhabitants could eventually afford them.
Thomas Edison did not invent the incandescent light bulb, but he was intent on fashioning one that could be easily attainable for the vast majority. Edison was the first to conceive of the idea of power plants that would deliver this modern miracle on a scale unknown then to the world. Edison was also the scientific pioneer who designed the first industrial research lab, bringing together the talents of many in search of solutions to the practical problems of common men and women.
Henry Ford was not the inventor of the combustible engine or the automobile, but Ford was the man whose greatest desire was to make a car that common people could actually afford to own and operate. Before Ford’s assembly-line production innovation, only aristocrats and other wealthy people could afford the luxury.
Next: “Confronting totalitarianism of all stripes has been one of the hallmarks of American existence…”
My wife is vacationing in France, she called me from Bayeux yesterday, having just returned from a tour of the Normandy beaches where our troops landed in June 1944. It was so peaceful and serene, she said. The American Cemetary is manicured expertly.
If you want to understand what the author is getting at here, do research on D-Day, Operation Overlord. Read the statistics: men, tonnage, boats, weather, leadership, aircraft….
Happy Thanksgiving.
A few years ago, around this time of year, I took the time and drove to the US military cemetary (Lorraine) in St. Avold, France.
http://www.abmc.gov/cemeteries/cemeteries/lo.php
When you come through the small admissions hall, which is free, you enter just near the monument and immediately see over 10,000 graves stretching over 100 acres.
It knocked the wind out of me.
Kyle-Anne
I wish for you and yours and wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving holiday. May all your hopes, dreams and wishes for the coming year be granted.
Below is something I wrote a year ago. I hope it doesn’t spoil it for you!
All the best.
Cfbleachers
http://pjmedia.com/blog/its-a-wonderful-leftist-life/
“What is to become of modern civilization if we Americans throw in the towel on the ideals of liberty and individual dignity, and stop believing that these are worth the suffering required to protect them? How can it be that young Americans do not see the bountiful blessings bestowed upon the rest of the world by us?”
The biggest danger to America today is liberalism. This is the political philosophy that goes against everything America stands for. It maintains that we are helpless people who need to depend on our government for everything. But what these morons do not understand is that any government that you depend on for everything can also take everything away from you whenever it wants, such as personal freedom, your individuality, and now, under Obamacare, your very right to life. This is what happens when you have schools and universities that do not thoroughly explain how magnificent this nation is. This is what happens when you have college teachers who do nothing but tear down this country, rather than try to help make it better by educating a new generation of true patriots. This is what happens when you take all your rights for granted, until they are gone, gobbled up by some nameless, faceless, government agency.
There are times in history where circumstances force us to do, or at least attempt to do, great things. The election in 2012 is such an occasion. In this upcoming election, we will have a pivotal choice to make. Either we give up all of our freedoms and hand them over to an all-powerful central government in Washington, or we stand up like a free people and put an end to it. Put an end to this vile corruption of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence. Stop Federal agencies from getting even more power than they ever deserved (such as the EPA and the FCC), and stop these unelected officials from destroying our lives. Yes, there are few times in history where the stakes are so high and where failure could actually change this nation forever.
So stand for something in 2012. Republicans will eventually get a candidate and, trust me, anything, ANYTHING, is better than what we have now. Unlike George Bailey, we will not have an angel helping us. We are going to have to do this on our own. And we’d better succeed, or else four years from now the country we once knew and loved will be gone, done away with by a socialist government that has absolutely no love or respect for the founding document they were sworn to uphold. So stand and be counted. It may just be your last chance to do so.
Well said LB46. Hard to add anything to what you said.
I just want to thank you for your wonderful words and add my plea for all conservatives to GET OUT AND VOTE!
We desparately need to stop liberals at every level of government.
Tejano Jack
It IS a wonderful American life. Printed your article this morning for my family.
We’re going to be celebrating my mom’s 80th B-Day today, a month early, as well. My parents immigrated here, legally, 44 years ago with six of us children. The twins were born two months later. So much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. We are all tea partiers and pray that this country does not turn into the socialist country we left. (A bitter-sweet Thanksgiving tho, since this will be the first one celebrated without my beloved husband of 33 years. May he rest in peace. It was a wonderful life for us.) God bless America.
Our human rights and freedom are given to us by G-D. Only power hungry men seek to take away what G-D has given to us.
I am deeply grateful and give thanks that our Most Wonderful G-D, Creator of the Universe, is the absolute opposite of the god of Islam.
Our loving Heavenly Father, Master of the Universe is loving, kind, merciful, compassionate and forgiving.
G-D’s Biblical requirement for ALL humanity is KINDNESS:
Bible, Micah 6:8 And what does the L-RD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-D.
I think it to love mercy, not kindness.
Happy Thanksgiving to all PJ readers and writers!
I take away from the movie the message that you need to learn to say no to people instead of giving in to their selfish demands. George Bailey wants to go to college and travel around the world, but nobody around him respects his desires and ambitions; they place higher priority on their inadequacy-driven needs which they expect Bailey to satisfy. Bailey basically has to sacrifice his life to fund a miniature version of the New Deal.
Actually, Thomas Edison did invent the incandescent electric light bulb, as well as centrally generated electric power, and literally hundreds of other inventions, including radically improved power generators, fuses, meters and other devices required to make it practical. He also radically improved both the telegraph and the telephone, and invented recorded sound, motion pictures, rechargable batteries, magnetic ore separation, underwater microphones (to stop the U-Boats), the mimeograph machine, and the electric car. (See the definitive bio by Matt Josephson for details.) With over 3000 patents, he is by far the most prolific inventor in human history.
But he didn’t stand alone. While the British began the industrial revolution by inventing the first steam engines,it was Americans who invented the high compression stream engine, thereby making it efficient and compact enough for mobile application. This enabled the two most revolutionary inventions of the first half of the 19th Century – the steam railroad and the steamboat, the latter of which was also invented and introduced into widespread service by Americans as early as our Republic’s second decade.
This tradition has continued down to the present. With only 4% of the world’s population, Americans are responsible for 50% of the patented inventions. We directly produce 25% of the global GDP ourselves, and our inventions are responsible for the large majority of the rest.
The whole world should give thanks for America.
Shiver: “If only America could have the intervention of a guardian angel to show us all a world as it might have been without our aid and comfort through the past 250 years.”
There are some science fiction “alternate history” stories that might do.
I enjoyed the novel “Bring the Jubilee,” by Ward Moore. In that novel, the North loses the Battle of Gettysburg, and shortly thereafter, the Civil War. The United States is permanently broken up, with a reasonably prosperous Confederacy next to a hyperinflation- and poverty-ridden rump United States.
By the mid 20th century, the world in “Jubilee” is much less advanced, and poorer, than the world we know. Electricity remains a curiosity, with gas lighting still in use in the 1940s. The telephone and the airplane are never invented, and automobiles remain highly expensive playthings for the wealthy few. Newspapers and circulars are still typeset painfully by hand, because the Linotype machine is never invented. All because the United States wasn’t around to be a major power.
Oh, and the novel ends with a cool twist ending too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_the_jubilee
You wrote, “Henry Ford was not the inventor of the combustible engine or the automobile …”
Make that the internal-combustion engine … though they are combustible when they malfunction. (From other posts around PJM, it seems the Chevy Volt may have a combustible engine!)
I haven’t watched IaWL yet this year, but I will. Its message is also the secret of America’s greatness: the importance of good men (and women) faithfully doing what needs doing, even when it isn’t glamorous or lucrative or what we wanted to do.
“To my brother George, the richest man in town.”
War on Christmas, the Rhode Island Battlefield
Future Christmas revisionism: “It’s Beginning to Look Like the Holidays.” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Holiday.” “All I Want for the Holidays Is My Two Front Teeth.” “Holidays in Killarney.”
The annual war on Christmas has resumed and a major battle is currently being fought in The Ocean State of Rhode Island.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the anti-Christmas forces–and they are formidable forces– is that, despite overwhelming national sentiment in favor of saying and celebrating “Christmas” instead of the generic “holiday,” liberal politicians and their cohorts in the media and among certain segments of the general populace never let up in trying to secularize this time of year.
What’s their problem?
On the one hand, the whole controversy which has been raging for years over a word is silly.
Does it really matter if a tree in the town square is called a holiday tree instead of a Christmas tree? Does it matter if Macy’s conducts holiday sales in lieu of Christmas sales? Does it matter if we wish one another, “Happy Holiday!” and not “Merry Christmas?”
On the other hand, if it didn’t matter, why do some people persist in trying to change a long-standing, popular tradition?
A recent Rasmussen Reports survey confirms what the majority of Americans already knew. By a whopping 70%, most of us prefer to celebrate Christmas rather than meaningless holidays. More specifically, seven out of ten opt for store signs wishing shoppers a Merry Christmas and not Happy Holidays.
It shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it is, moreso for the grinches than for the traditionalists. The grinch contingent seems obsessed with the need to unnecessarily change what doesn’t need changing.
One rhetorical question is, why? Another is, why are virtually all the grinches liberals? The answers are simple: Liberals despise tradition, especially any tradition that smacks of Christianity, and they are grinchy because their philosophy is inherently devious and intolerant.
Case in point: The Associated Press is reporting that Rhode Island’s liberal governor, Lincoln D. Chafee, in defiance of a symbolic resolution passed by his state’s House of Representatives, is insisting the statehouse 17′ blue spruce scheduled to be lit on December 6th be called a holiday, not a Christmas tree . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=7944.)
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