To you all. Yes, we’ve just taken an awful beating, and must now come to terms with the grim fact that the great Republic born with such promise in 1789 is now a tottering corpse, beyond hope of resurrection, and that its future now holds only decomposition and decay.
But if you have family and friends to hold close, if you have a roof over your head and clothes on your back and food to eat, if you still have a healthy body and sense enough to perceive all the beauty in the world, then you have a very great deal indeed to be thankful for.
At the very least, as Al Swearengen reminds us, we aren’t dead. And that’s plenty.
My thanks to you, readers, for joining me here all these years. Let’s raise a glass and be genuinely thankful for all our many blessings.
4 Comments
The notion that America is a dysfunctional body politic facing impending doom has been with us for some time, as the following article illustrates:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-20/a-thanksgiving-message-for-obama-s-america.html
While I doubt that you will be going to Maureen Montgomery’s house for mince meat pie, best wishes for a great Thanksgiving to you, Nina, and your two exceptionally talented kids.
No, what faces us now is unprecedented. The America that rode out the crises your article mentioned no longer exists, and so its time is over. This once-mighty nation is now a cut flower.
But let’s not dwell on it today!
I think it is human nature to remember the time of one’s youth as halcyon days of irenic harmony and prelapsarian innocence, when you could drive your Chevy to the levee (happy motoring!) and find good old boys drinking whiskey and rye.
When we were growing up, the 10:00 news on Channel 5 had the Honor Roll, which was a crawl with the names of soldiers who died in Vietnam that day, usually numbering in the dozens. American cities burned in race riots and National Guard troops killed four dead in O-hi-o. Russia and China were nuclear, belligerent, and sworn to our destruction. Two Kennedys and a King were assassinated. Gays were closeted, women had career choices ranging from teacher to librarian, and segregated lunch counters and buses had just been outlawed. Not to mention that there were only three television networks, one black rotary phone (soon to be joined by the Trimline and Princess phones), and ethnic cuisine meant one from column A and two from column B.
Whatever problems may exist now, you have a generation which has grown up knowing nothing about bomb shelters, riots, or John-John saluting the coffin. I think there is much more social cohesion now than then, when rioting students were beaten by Chicago police and the now-forgotten “generation gap” was a bridge too far.
While I understand your core belief that the arrival of Hope and Change, the Sequel, is proof positive that the U. S. of A. has lost its moorings, I would argue that America has rarely, if ever, been in as good a place as we are now, for which we should all be thankful.
Yes, yes, of course. Everything’s swell, really, and getting better and better.
I said I didn’t want to dwell on this today, so I’ll just say this: I used to see things that way myself.
So: if you really are determined to choose the blue pill — and I can see that you are — enjoy it while it lasts. It may well play out for another decade or two. After all, Rome wasn’t ruined in a day.
In 1967 there were riots in Detroit, a great American city.
Now there is no Detroit.
I’ll quote Churchill:
Oh well — at least you’ll have your pad Thai, iPhone, and ESPN to look back on, when that last flagstone cracks.