Post-Thanksgiving Gratitude

O

ver the centuries, Thanksgiving has gradually become America’s official we-are-lucky-to-be-where-we-are-and-what-we-are-today celebration.  There are millions of reasons – literally – for this exceptional phenomenon. Yet those reasons come packaged in so many combinations and permutations that it would take a Cray supercomputer to calculate their number and composition.

If this sounds like hyperbole, consider this:  Where else in the world in the last 400 years have so many people gravitated?  Yes, we have shortcomings; plenty of them – both individually and as a nation – but where else have so many of the world’s wretched come for relief and for an opportunity to start over again?

The answers are self-evident and need no further articulation.  Everybody on this globe knows where in the Western Hemisphere lies that great land of freedom nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

Enormous problems confront America today: 

There is the comatose economy, much of it brought on by our own man-made internal political intransigencies. 

There is that seemingly never-ending war on two fronts – one being waged in the open, the other largely clandestine – in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and we are opening a third front in Yemen to choke out the roots of radical Islamic Jihad.  

Within our own boundaries we are getting besieged by a similar home-grown terrorist threat conceived by organized cells or by lone American citizens with problematic allegiance, motivated by the same ideology.

Despite those daunting challenges, it’s still a good time to count not only our individual blessings, but also our national ones.  I remain an optimist about the U.S. and am – most of all – grateful that it welcomed my mom and dad from our friendly neighbor to the north.

I know what it means to be a first-generation immigrant whose parents labored under the most dreadful of economic conditions – worse than those of today – as they raised a family whose offspring sought education, employment and opportunity. 

Somehow, we pulled through; and we never looked back. 

Thanks America.  We love you.