Giving Thanks for America’s Wonderful Life
And then there is my personal favorite invention of the entire 20th Century, the internet. All Americans ought to pause for a moment and consider whether any other country in the world, whose military had invented the internet, would have shared this beyond-amazing technology with the common man all over the entire planet. I don’t think so. If the Russians or the Chinese had invented the internet, they would have used it as a weapon of war, reserved to themselves and their like-minded communist tyrants. If any Muslim country had invented the internet, they would have used it to keep their modern slavery going forever. But America has shared this amazing open communication channel with the whole world. This one thing alone ought to quell any talk of American imperialism until the end of time. The internet, to this very day, is the most democratic and human-rights enabling invention since the printing press, and every citizen in every country ought to be heralding our generosity on this one with celebration.
The American innovations in farming alone have spared millions from miserable lives and starvation. The American innovations in science and medicine have made incalculable improvements in the lives of real people all over the world for more than a century.
And certainly at the forefront of America’s contributions to world civilization have been the wars fought in defiance of tyranny. Confronting totalitarianism of all stripes has been one of the hallmarks of American existence, and the only land we’ve claimed as victors was enough to bury our dead. Wars fought by Americans, both at home during the Civil War, and abroad, have unarguably provided the greatest advances in the cause of human rights — ever.
As we allow our country to be downgraded like some worthless stock in meltdown mode, it might behoove us to just take a few moments to glance back at what we will be leaving behind. No nation has ever been perfect; none ever will be. But destroying the best one to date without a tested plan for a replacement is nothing more than the work of fools.
As I watch It’s a Wonderful Life this year, as is our custom on Thanksgiving Day, I’m going to put America in the place of George Bailey, for we are now at our bleakest hour and see ourselves as Bailey did, as an abject failure without ever having fulfilled our original promise. And just as George Bailey saw what his world would have been like without his simple good deeds and honest striving, so I will imagine a world without there ever having been an America.
As I see this scenario in my mind’s eye, I know that I’ll once again be joyful in the American experiment’s successes and will rejoice at her magnificent contributions to the health, happiness, and prosperity for not only ourselves, but in truth, for the whole world.
Happy Thanksgiving, America! You deserve it.
*******
Check out Kyle-Anne’s previous PJ Steel Magnolia articles:
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| The Five Most Infantile Beliefs on Display at the ‘Occupy’ Tantrums | Barry Honey, Let’s Do Talk About Jobs |
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| Why Herman Cain Electrifies the Grassroots: Five Voters Speak Out |
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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