Thanksgiving Thoughts for You

[Guest guest]

Howdy Y'all,

 

This will be my first Thanksgiving in the USA in maybe 17-18 years ..

and after having spent more than half my life abroad I feel blessed to

be Back Home now.

 

I wanna wish all you good folks a very Happy and Safe Thanksgiving.

Likely it is that I'll not get on the net till late tomorrow and even

then I might doze off at the keyboard cause we'l;l be cooking and

consuming a 12 + pound Turkey Boid .. along with stuffing, sweet

taters, smashed taters, gravy, peas, corn, cranberry sauce, cornbread.

apple and Key Lime pie .. and a few other trimmings.

 

Sorta funny was our shopping trip a few days ago .. I put a Turkey

into the cart and Tanya commented that it was a bit big for the three

of us .. considering that Alexander isn't gonna eat all that much ..

but I told her it was really a small Turkey. Later, she threw a 9 +

pound Goose into the cart .. and I thought that was great cause Goose

is the traditional Boid for Christmas dinner in Russia. Got home and

she was checking the bill and was surprised that the Turkey cost us

but $13.84 .. $1.09 a pound .. but more surprised were both of us when

we saw that the Goose cost $43.17 .. $4.38 a pound. She thought the

Turkey was gonna cost fortune cause they are expensive in Russia ..

and thought the Goose would be cheap cause they are cheap in Russia ..

and that just goes to show that what we see is sometimes shaded by our

past expereinces .. or interpretation of same.

 

A couple of Thanksgiving Day thoughts I'll share with you. I realize

that this message is from a Conservative point of view .. I tried to

find an alternative slant but, fortunately, I could not. Perhaps

someone else will send one .. based on their interpretation of how

things are or ought to be .. from a perspective that focuses on the

negative and tells us just how miserable we should be be feeling.

That would give a bit of balance to the below .. a very, very little

bit of balance. ;-)

 

Happy Thanksgiving to you all .. and y'all keep smilling. :-)

 

Butch .. http://www.AV-AT.com

 

**American By Birth ** Southern By The Grace Of God ** Patriot By Choice**

 

 

 

For What the Thanks?

 

By MARK STEYN

November 19, 2007

 

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving

as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere,

even if there are significant local variations: in Continental Europe,

naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in

Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and

celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake

and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit.

All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving

(excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version)

is unique to America. " What's it about? " an Irish visitor asked me a

couple of years back. " Everyone sits around giving thanks all day?

Thanks for what? George bloody Bush? "

 

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this

country as " the New World " in part because it has an eternal newness

which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could

have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you

think you're on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in

an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood

movies where the guy tells the waitress " Gimme a cuppa joe " and slides

over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the

coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing

choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb

sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.

Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and

drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu

item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad

genius!

 

But Americans aren't novelty junkies on the important things. " The New

World " is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on

earth, to a degree " the Old World " can barely comprehend. Where it

counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a

totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that

Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots

going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and

Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only

to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently

it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The

U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's

or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century

castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing

mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from

the Anglophone democracies, most of " the west " 's nation states have

been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution

from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible

to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union.

If you're going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel

cappuccino than the Third Reich.

 

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you're struck by the assumed

stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a

bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist

anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled,

gutted, raped and tortured, sliced'n'diced the Constitution, put it in

a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this

argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most

western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in

effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and

did it. I don't believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to

abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the left claims to

detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching

that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an

appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In

Europe, by contrast, one reason why there's no politically significant

pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the

life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as

part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to

fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide's usually

up to your neck.

 

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning

nation states. Because they've been so inept at exercising it,

Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would

never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to

the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to

transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving

the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national

sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a

tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S.

can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start

saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in

any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they

claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban

democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of

engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the

photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans

and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the

world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more

unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a

debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump

and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign

hegemon in history.

 

That said, Thanksgiving isn't about the big geopolitical picture, but

about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma

celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of

Rodgers and Hammerstein's eponymous anthem:

 

" We know we belong to the land And the land we belong to is grand! "

 

Which isn't a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three

hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because

there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The

land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched

from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting

constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate,

but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies

were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around

the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this

Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human

history their blessings are.Mark Steyn (born 1959) is a Canadian

journalist, columnist, and film and music critic. In recent years, he

has written mostly about politics, from a conservative viewpoint. His

2006 book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, was a

New York Times Bestseller.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

Cherish Every Moment

 

 

By Michelle Malkin

Stop Before You Gripe

 

Before you blow your top about the holiday hassle at the airport, the

long lines at the grocery store, all the hours you'll spend cooking

and cleaning, the uninvited guests who are crashing hubby's football

party, and the endless Christmas shopping list that awaits, just stop.

 

Stop and think of the Johnson family. Army Spc. John Austin Johnson of

El Paso, Texas, is recovering from massive head wounds sustained in an

IED attack. Johnson is a member of Fort Bliss' 4-1 Cavalry. He had

survived five previous bombing incidents. That is not all.

 

Earlier this month, Johnson and his wife, Mona Lisa, buried their

9-year-old son, Tyler Anthony Johnson. The little boy had been on life

support for several weeks after sustaining critical injuries in a

horrible car accident. He was on his way with his family to see his

dad in recuperation at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. He

never made it. The family car rolled over several times after being

hit by powerful blasts of wind. Tyler was laid to rest at Pinecrest

Memorial Park in Benton, Ark. That is not all.

 

The Johnsons had two other children. Ashley Mishelle was 5 years old.

Logan Wesley was 2. They were killed instantly in the same car crash

that claimed their older brother's life. During the funeral service,

the Benton Courier reported, the program included Ashley Mishelle's

favorite song — Ashley Simpson's " Pieces of Me " — and Sarah

McLachlan's haunting " In the Arms of an Angel. " White doves were

donated by a retired military officer.

 

To lose one child is devastating enough. To lose three? While

recovering from traumatic war injuries? And to bury three little

angels just weeks before Thanksgiving? No parent can read of

suffering like that of the Johnsons and indulge the petty, selfish

complaints of holiday gripers and road-ragers. The complainers

featured on the nightly news this week wallowing in self-pity over a

few hours' delay on the road or in the air need to get a grip, get

over themselves and get some perspective.

 

C.S. Lewis wrote famously that " God whispers to us in our pleasures,

speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone

to rouse a deaf world. " Thankfully, countless citizens were roused by

the Johnsons' plight — and demonstrated that the American giving

spirit lasts 365 days a year.

 

More than 200 Patriot Guard Riders, the volunteer band of motorcycle

enthusiasts who provide protection during military funerals, served as

Tyler's pallbearers. The Patriot Guards traveled from Arkansas,

Tennessee and Louisiana to attend. Anonymous donors provided the

gravesites and markers for the children's plots. That is not all.

 

Soldiers' Angels provided hotel stays as needed for the Johnsons'

extended family in Dallas, a Brooke Army Medical Center official told

the American Forces Press Service. The group also provided funding

for food and other basic needs. The Dallas Veteran Service

Organization and the Veterans of Foreign Wars pitched in with meals.

Operation Comfort covered gas for rental cars, which were provided by

Hertz and National. That is not all.

 

The Fisher House Foundation's Hero Miles program provided travel for

Johnson to get to his injured wife. American Airlines picked up the

tab for the Johnsons to travel to their children's funerals. The

Professional Golfers Association raised $95,000 for a new car and

other expenses. Operation Homefront will use leftover funds to build

a permanent memorial playground in the children's honor at Fort Bliss.

 

Before Thanksgiving brings out the worst in you, stop before you

gripe. Give thanks for noisy houses, healthy children and overflowing

company. Give thanks for bounteous tables, rambunctious friends and

neighbors, life and limb. And give thanks for those who give of

themselves — in service to our nation, in civic duty and in answer to

His call — all year 'round. That is all.

[Guest guest]

I woke up with the same thoughts of thankfulness. Butch is a little right

of center and I'm a little left, but we are both patriots and both love this

country. We are only two viewpoints, representative of the differing

philosophies that make up our incredible diversity. I just think a little

more clearly than he does. Oh, I kid the Butch. :-)

 

Having spent a goodly amount of time with Native Americans up close and

personal during my research in 1974, I am very aware of the sentiments

Kathleen puts forth and the hardship and sorrow that is mostly hidden on

their reservations today, out of view for the general American population .

.. . This shows the dark side of America. To only know Native Americans as

" noble savages " does not nearly portray their colorful and varying cultures

as a whole. We have to remember, though, that Butch is a military man and

mostly looks at most things from a military perspective. I'd ask, however,

who were the savages when countless thousands of Indian children were taken

into abject poverty and slavery in the boarding schools of early America,

aptly chronicled by Marilyn Irvin in Indian Orphanages, the first book to

focus exclusively on this subject. Marilyn Holt's study interweaves Indian

history, educational history, family history, and child welfare policy to

tell the story of Indian orphanages within the larger context of the orphan

asylum in America. (University Press of Kansas, 2001) Children as young as

5, taken from their parents, punished if they spoke their native tongue and

forced to work as slaves and bend to an education aimed to purge them of all

their culture and history. The broken treaties are only but a slice of the

injustices.

 

I grew up celebrating traditional Thanksgiving, of course; my early

childhood memories of those family gatherings help me temper my sadness of

the underbelly of Thanksgiving learned in later years, with my own pleasant

history. So, there are things for which I give thanks.

 

I am thankful for having mentors and lamplighters who shaped my educational

and professional choices; those who helped me ultimately choose a path of

small and natural, embracing renewables and stewardship. I'm thankful for

good fellowship with like-minded entrepreneurs and aficionados like those

here and elsewhere on my path. Many who inspire me as well as challenge me.

I am grateful to live in a country where diversity still reigns, even if

challenged by a homogenizing corporatocracy about to engulf us all. With

this in mind, my recommendation for a holiday movie would be " What Would

Jesus Buy? " produced/directed by Morgan Spurlock of " Supersize Me " fame.

Who knows, I might be inspired to run off and join the Reverend Billy's Stop

Shopping Choir for a tour of duty. :-)

 

Best wishes to all here for a day of feasting and good times with families

and friends. And, a tip of the hat to those who choose to spend the day

making the feast in shelters and churches for those who aren't able to do so

themselves. Bless you.

 

Be well,

Marcia Elston

Samara Botane/Nature Intelligence, est. 1988

http://www.wingedseed.com Online 3/95

http://www.aromaconnection.org Group Blog 2/07

" Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide and slavery - have

resulted from obedience, not disobedience. "

Howard Zinn

[Guest guest]

AFTER I read the entire piece I saw that

the author was Canadian, lol.

 

I still maintain that there is nothing diluted

about MY TG day, I generally cook my brains out

and love doing it!