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.