Thanksgiving represents everything that makes America great! ?? ? ??

In 2006, a few days before Christmas, doctors announced my wife had six months to live. She had, they said, a rare form of cancer that had spread to her lungs. There was really nothing that could be done. We had a one-year-old and I had been told my job was coming to an end the same day of the diagnosis. Thankfully, it was a misdiagnosis. Not only did I keep my job, but I kept my wife. Ten years later, doctors informed my wife they suspected she had a genetic form of lung cancer. Had my wife not been misdiagnosed in 2006, they would not have known about her lung cancer in 2016. My wife has stage four lung cancer. It is genetic. There is no cure. Nine years ago, she was given two years to live. She is still here. Thankfulness can be a very abstract concept. We are grateful for things. We are thankful for things. We thank people. Often our gratitude comes from random events, seeming accidents and happy coincidences. We don’t often think about a man upstairs guiding our lives, let alone history. Things happen. We are thankful for dodging bullets, unanswered prayers, answered prayers and the kindnesses of random strangers, family and friends. As we become more successful in life, it is often harder to be thankful for small things. Small things loom large when we are small, starting our career before life explodes into family, debt, career, success and income. Then, many of the acts of kindness, gratitude and thankfulness shrink. A twenty-dollar bill is immeasurably larger and a great act of kindness to a struggling twenty-something than to a well-off forty-something. But it is still an act of kindness. The thankfulness just changes based on where one is in life. Two months ago, my wife fell down the stairs on the way out to church. She broke her foot. She has been healing from the break only to get hospitalized with an illness. The week after she got out of the hospital, my father got put into the hospital. I am thankful for my sisters who live closer to my parents than me who could tend to them while I tend to my wife. I am thankful for the doctors and the offers of help. I am way more thankful as I get older for the prayers of others than when I was young. “I’ll pray” is as much a Southernism as “bless your heart” and asking how someone is when you really are not interested in the answer. It is what you say, but it’s not necessarily what you mean. I say it when I mean it, and I am more appreciative as I get older when people really do it. This last month has been a whirlwind for family health, work, professional growth and setbacks. The friend’s casserole or the neighbor covering dinner is far less meaningful now than their heartfelt prayers. Thankfully for all of them, the sacrifice of time to make room in prayers for other people than self is what I am more thankful for as I age. We live in extraordinary and bizarre times. We have, right now, as you read this, a robot roaming Mars and a massive telescope in space beaming back incredible images of the edge of space. Online and on television, we have clowns performing for our attention, votes, support, opposition or clicks. Sorting through it all can generate anxiety and a desire to unplug from it all. Why tune in when it is more pleasant to tune out and not think about things? But thinking and engaging is a civic and necessary virtue. When we do, we should at least consider the small things for which we are thankful, from the small acts of kindness to the random events that just happen. I am thankful for the surprises in life that make me appreciate life still with my wife. In these overwhelming and extraordinary times, do not fail to be thankful. There is still so much to be thankful for. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post There Is So Much to Be Thankful For appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The nation will this week partake in a ritual unlike any other in the rest of the world. Americans of all persuasions, races, and creeds will gather with family around the table and give thanks, most of them to the Almighty, for the bounty they have received this year. It’s easy to take Thanksgiving for granted. And yet it is something uniquely American, and truly a wonder. It is a holiday that confirms that we as a country are committed to gratitude and to recommitting ourselves annually to this national character trait. It acts as some sort of baptismal sacrament. Immigrants take their first timorous step toward Americanization when they start honoring this sacred holiday and learn to cook its dishes. And thereby, without being fully aware, they begin to incarnate the national spirit. In personal terms, a disposition to be grateful renders important benefits, reducing anxiety and depression, and making us better companions and better sleepers. This is so self-evident it hardly requires research to substantiate it, but the evidence does exist. In geopolitics, the thankful disposition draws a bright line between the United States and wretched states officially devoted to its opposite, ungratefulness. A commitment to gratitude may have been one of the things—right up there with love of liberty—that made America the historic sworn enemy of Marxism, whose guiding ideology, envy, is the wages of ingratitude. Thanksgiving is unquestionably uniquely American. I have lived at least a year in seven countries, in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, many more if one counts shorter stays, and have never encountered anything like it anywhere else. Yes, in East Asia, I experienced firsthand what the Koreans call the Chuseok festival, held on 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, so from late September to early October, depending on the year. But it’s not dedicated to giving thanks, but rather to the full moon. Canada, Liberia and the Caribbean island-nation of Grenada also have official Thanksgiving days, but they are derivatives of America’s. Thanksgiving is not just uniquely tied to this country because it is reflective of the American national character. Its lineage is the thread of the national quilt. Anyone who has watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and its companion, The Mayflower Voyagers, will know the essentials of how the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims and their Indian hosts in 1621 in the Plymouth Colony. Right there, Thanksgiving starts as a needed slap in the face to the “land acknowledgement” crowd. (And yes, it might be better to read a book and learn history right and not from Peanuts, but don’t underestimate the value of popular culture in propagandizing the national spirit. When Charlie Brown exclaims at the Thanksgiving table, “We thank the Lord for a bountiful harvest,” Hollywood was telling generations of young Americans that it wasn’t just ok to be patriotic and faithful, but that it was normal and expected.) Then, in one of its very firsts acts, the first Congress in 1789 requested that the newly elected President Washington proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving. But it wasn’t till later, in the middle of the Civil War and in response to a persistent, decades-long letter-writing campaign by editor and writer Sarah Josepha Hale, that Abraham Lincoln in 1863 proclaimed the last Thursday in November as our official day of Thanksgiving. Then Congress in 1941, just as America was about to enter another war, officially made it the fourth Thursday. Thus, Congress and our most important leaders ratified an outlook that is the gift that keeps on giving. Experiencing gratitude is “associated with greater longevity among older adults,” says a Harvard study last year. According to the British Psychological Society, “around 18.5 per cent of individual differences in people’s happiness could be predicted by the amount of gratitude they feel.” Saying thanks to your partner and meaning it also makes the institution of marriage stronger. A team at the University of Illinois found that “higher levels of perceived gratitude buffered against the stresses of both financial strain and ineffective arguing.” (One could ask, in marriage, is there any other type of arguing?) Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, a 2009 study found that “Gratitude was uniquely related to total sleep quality, subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, and daytime dysfunction.” Of course, Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and the various congresses in question—to say nothing of the Pilgrim fathers, Samoset or Squanto—did not have any of these benefits in mind, they just wanted to thank the Lord. Maybe the unintended consequences are payback. That is not going to help you deal with your aunt who voted for Kamala Harris and will show up dressed in a Handmaid’s Tale outfit. Just tell her that if President Trump and Zohran Mamdani can bury the hatchet, she can get along with others, too. Happy Thanksgiving. Originally published by Washington Examiner. The post Don’t Take Thanksgiving for Granted appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Throughout the year, the left has insisted that President Donald Trump is some kind of dictator. They chant “NO KINGS!” in the streets and warn that Trump is one executive order away from turning America into a monarchy. But if Americans want a real example of government overreach, they don’t...

Local law enforcement on Wednesday arrested Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, for shooting two National Guardsmen near the White House in Washington, DC earlier the same day.  Lakanwal was admitted into the country as part of a program bringing local partners for American forces to the U.S. after the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. He had worked with the CIA’s counterterrorist paramilitaries in the country, the so-called Zero Units, per multiple sources. He reportedly resides in Bellevue, Washington with his wife and five children. The victims Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24, both remain in critical condition. Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a Thursday news briefing that, if either dies, she will charge Lakanwal with first-degree murder. He currently faces three counts of assault with intent to kill, and the Department of Justice is considering pursuing terrorism charges. President Donald Trump has ordered the deployment of 500 more National Guardsmen to the federal capital.  The post Afghan National Detained for Shooting National Guardsmen Worked With CIA appeared first on The American Conservative.