Happy Thanksgiving!

To you and yours from all of us here, the best and happiest of Thanksgivings despite all of the uncertainty and resultant fear we face. Enjoy a few of the things that really matter: not sales, not stuff, not even food, really, but family and friends and the time we spend together, the stories we share, the shared losses and additions of family members, and the One who directs it all and most graciously and most wonderfully keeps all balanced in His hands, no matter how it looks to our weak eyes.

…we are witnessing the rise of a new deductive, anti-scientific age.

Instead of Christian, southern-twanged fundamentalists, we see instead kinder, gentler federal bureaucrats, globetrotting Ph.D.s, liberal hucksters, and politically correct diversity officers.

One of the persistent American misunderstandings is that Thanksgiving is about celebrating abundance.

…Rockwell’s splendid table would make even a poor hostess blush today. One normal-size bird, a covered dish, some cranberries and a dinky relish tray for 13 people?

…When Rockwell painted the happy clan, all grinning at the prospect of a big feed, America was an economically depressed nation struggling through a two-front world war. Grandma had to empty out her ration book to lay out even that humble spread.

…our founders were so careful to make American rights about preventing the government from doing things to you rather than requiring the government to do things for you.

Even so, we’ve come to believe that plenty is part of the national purpose.

…But if we look at the most important thanksgiving celebrations in American history, the pickings were even slimmer than they were for Rockwell’s hungry, war-rationed clan.

… The puritans in Massachusetts knew nothing but fear and want. They weren’t celebrating how good things were, but rather how God would deliver them from native tribes, starvation and pox of various kinds.

When Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday 80 years before Rockwell unveiled his painting, the tide had turned in the Civil War but much awful bloodshed lay ahead. Lincoln still urged his countrymen to celebrate “the gracious gifts of the Most High God.”

Half of them died that first terrible winter in Plymouth, and, if it hadn’t been for constant human reinforcements, New England might have stalled out. In the end, though, Winthrop proved right: The colonists had arrived on a continent of stupendous, awe-inspiring abundance. With ingenuity and commercial pluck, they tapped its vast riches in what would become history’s greatest adventure in wealth-creation.

… it was the nature and mores of the people that mattered most. They weren’t given to sitting still. “The Pilgrims,” Ted Morgan writes in his book Wilderness at Dawn, “are our first example of that restless mobility that was supposed to have originated on the frontier.”

…the Pilgrims grasped a fundamental point about economic motivation. In 1623, they rejected their initial system of collectivism, and each family got its own plot of land. Bradford called it “a very good success, for it makes all hands very industrious.” They had learned “the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s . . . that the taking away of property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.”

As our Founding Fathers knew in their bones, this represented the merest beginning, situated as we were in what George Washington called “a most enviable condition.” Paul Johnson writes in his magisterial A History of the American People (Jen’s note: this book is FANTASTIC!) that 300 years after Winthrop’s arrival, “the United States was producing, with only 6 percent of the world’s population and land area, 70 percent of its oil, nearly 50 percent of its copper, 38 percent of its lead, 42 percent each of its zinc and coal, and 46 percent of its iron — in addition to 54 percent of its cotton and 62 percent of its corn.”

For more on this very topic, check out The Real Story of Thanksgiving.

…I consider myself blessed to be an American.

Traveling the country I find Americans the most resilient people on earth, united in their guardedly optimistic belief in the future and firm in their conviction that their nation is exceptional, notwithstanding fashionable claims to the contrary.

I am thankful for those Americans who defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics by acting as if entropy should be defied. They get up each morning, prepare themselves to meet the day, and keep the engines of industry moving. These are our unsung heroes. We don’t erect statues of these people and they aren’t recognized by our elites, but they represent the backbone of the nation.

I am also thankful for national openness, for the encouragement to innovate. America may be suffering from cultural degradation, but it also fosters ideas — what Julian Simon called the “ultimate resource.” It will ultimately be our economic salvation.

So on this Thanksgiving I count my blessings and thank God that I am here in the United States.

I thank God daily for my family and for the amazing opportunities and blessings bestowed upon me.  Just to have been born in America is an amazing blessing, as much of the world is controlled by tyrants, thugs, despots and slave drivers.

America is the last best place — that shining city on a hill.  Give sincere thanks by keeping it shining.