A Thanksgiving Sampler :: SteynOnline:
"Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers. Here are a few Thanksgiving thoughts from me over the years...
Fourteen years ago, the first Thanksgiving after 9/11 also marked the fall of the Taliban.
This is from my anthology The Face Of The Tiger:
We can be thankful that this month, for the first time, the UN has met its target for getting sufficient supplies into Afghanistan to feed its starving people.
It turns out the quickest way to end the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is to remove its idiot government.
Conversely, the best way to keep people starving is to cook up new wheezes to maintain the thugs in power, as Christian Aid tried to do when it demanded a humanitarian "bombing pause" for Ramadan...
Thanksgiving is an American holiday, but over the years I've suggested the foreign chappies ought to raise a cheer or three, too.
This is from 2007:
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 US 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... If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only a shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable...
And finally, to return to that song Hugh Hewitt mentioned above:
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 fourteen 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.
