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Thankful…for WHAT? 

By Cliff Johns

Imagine for a moment that the US did not exist. What if there were no Pilgrims, no Declaration of Independence, no Congress, no Supreme Court, no President, no Bill of Rights, no New Deal, no U.S. Military and, of course, no Thanksgiving.  Imagine that instead of a country settled by entrepreneurial and faith-driven Europeans it was settled by other countries and leaders with different ambitions, different ideals, different values, different morals, different ethics, vastly different religions and more importantly very different ideas about freedom.  What would your world be like today?  One practical scenario would have to consider the following:

Let’s start out…you are poor, everyone you know lives in poverty.  There are virtually no computers, televisions or radios.  Few people can afford cars.  Food and medicine are scarce.   

Education for most stops at the 6th grade.  There are only a few government colleges, but common people never get a chance to go.  There are no public libraries.  All news and media is controlled by the government.  Your family’s very lives are defined by corruption, misery, starvation, sickness, overwork, and at best a short life.  If married, you must obtain permission to have a child.  Pregnancy without permission prompts a mandatory abortion. 

Since the US does not exist, Germany won World War II and Nazi fascism swept the world except for the Middle-East where wabbism, a violent form of Islam still exists.  After Hitler won the war, his idea of Nazis became global Nazis and after overwhelming virtually every village, city and nation on the globe all the Jews, Blacks, Christians, Freedom Fighters and homosexuals were exterminated in global concentration camps.  There is no Crusade for Children, Kosair Hospital, or Home of the Innocents because the Nazi model does not allow people who are chronically ill, handicapped, or mentally ill to live.  National Holidays celebrate people like Hitler (of course),  Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Ho Chi Minh; all apparently heroes in a brain-washed world. Without the U.S., these despicable people killed or caused to be killed not 94 million but some 4 billion souls. 

The leading causes of death among children, if they are not aborted by government edict, are Polio and Typhoid.  Jonas Salk, a Russian-Jew, was murdered in a concentration camp by the Nazi police shortly after he was born in what would have been New York City.  As a result, he wasn’t around to develop a vaccine for Polio.  Water is contaminated with human waste, so Typhoid is a constant problem.  Soviet-style unionized labor and poor construction inspection result in water treatment machinery that is in need of constant repair.   

There are no U.S. pharmaceutical companies who develop most of the drugs that heal the earth’s population today.  People like us never get life saving drugs either because we lack the money for a bribe or because of poor distribution.    One third of the residents of our village have AIDS.

You live in an agrarian economy, which means you have to grow or hunt what we eat.  You have electricity but it is unreliable, being off more often than it is on.  Phones exist, but government agents listen in on every call. 

Most rivers, streams and lakes are so heavily polluted they contain few fish and support less wildlife.  There was no space race and so there are no satellites, no GPS, no real-time news from around the world; no one ever went to the moon and the International Space Station is, well…just science fiction. 

Representational Democracy is a pipe dream.  There are elections but with only one name on the ballot there is no choice.  The purpose of voting is to keep track of everyone so you can be repressed more effectively by the fascists. 

You work six days a week, 10-12 hours a day, doing mostly manual labor.    Survival is a real issue every day.  Being too sick to work is the only vacation you get.  The average life span is 43 for men and 48 for women.  One out of two children dies within three years of birth.  Suicide is the leading cause of death for adults over 30.

You could complain or try to rebel but it would result in a one way ticket to a concentration camp of which there are plenty.  After WWII, there were about 100 in Europe; now there are almost 1000 on each continent. 

Thankfully, the scenario I just described did not happen and we actually do have a lot to be thankful for.  To begin with, we live in what most of the world would agree is the greatest country in the history of the world.  Why else is it that virtually everyone wants to visit here, work here, live here, move here and eventually stay here?  Could it be that America really is an alabaster city on a hill, a city built on a foundation of sacrifice by others who desired a greater future?  A future illuminated by economic opportunity that results in commerce drawing every race color and creed into the marketplace of ideas?  Such a city is a shining example of freedom to the world, and the world is flocking here.

The U.S. is great in many ways:  We produce the greatest wealth per capita, out-producing every country of the world. We are the world’s only super power, which we use not for empire building but democracy building.  Fifty six million people in Afghanistan and Iraq now have new models for freedom that built the wealth of Western Europe, Japan Australia and more. Imagine what a difference fifty six million thankful people will make in the future of the world.   

The U.S. is passing the torch of economic freedom to developing countries around the world as we move production of consumer goods from here to there.  This was the same production that produced the world of wealth and opportunity that you and I live in today.  It is exciting that people in developing countries are doing just that…developing. 

The U.S. leads the world in almost every area of technology with some 450 patents every single day.  We create miracle drugs that cure and heal.  These drugs are sold at deep discounts in developing countries to ensure that medicine is available to those in need and of less means. 

Our country was founded on God’s 10 Commandments which guided the Founding Fathers to develop the rule of law that protects our way of life.  The next time you are in Washington, D.C. be sure to visit the Supreme Court where you will see the 10 Commandments chiseled into the stone wall of the main chamber.  Being thankful for such an amazing system that created this rule of law seems obvious.   Thankful that is, unless you happen to be an unborn child who is slated for abortion, then, that same law, somehow, based not on what is actually in the U.S. Constitution, but on a legal argument about it, can still get your brain sucked out moments before birth.  Each child born today definitely has something to be thankful for.  Perhaps some of them will change things so that every child can one day enjoy the freedom to join us in a future Thanksgiving.  It’s not hard to imagine what they would be thankful for. 

Clearly we have a great country, perhaps the greatest the world will ever know.  What is also clear is that much hard work remains to be done. 

So, you would be thankful for …exactly what?   

Cliff Johns

Thanksgiving 2005

http://www.cliffblogs4u.blogspot.com/

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