Americans have much to be thankful for, including not being part of Covid-crazed Europe
Growing up in Australia, Thanksgiving was one of those obscure American holidays nobody took much notice of, something to do with turkeys and stuffing.
It is however the best sort of holiday for a multicultural nation, a celebration of the best of humanity without the political baggage a religious festival such as Christmas inevitably brings.
It’s too bad Australia, with a similarly rich multicultural makeup, should have taken on Thanksgiving instead of adopting the mindlessness of Halloween.
Four hundred years ago in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims enjoyed a successful first harvest thanks to the generosity and support of the Wampanoag Indian tribes. Two groups of people, Pilgrims from Europe, and Native American Indians, with wildly different customs and outlooks, put their differences aside to share in their common humanity.
On the fourth Thursday of every November Americans gather with friends and family to mark this wonderful success story, an event before its time given the horrible race relations that were to develop later.
For a country that’s so used to being criticised at home and abroad, Thanksgiving offers a time to reflect on what’s good about America.
To be sure, America is a massively divided nation, socially and economically; all this is well known. But it’s too often judged against ideals that no other country comes close to living up to.
The fact hundreds of thousands migrants cross the southern border to seek a better life every month, not to mention highly skilled migrants from rich countries, is testament to the desirability of living in the US.
Yet beating up on the US, its culture, governance, and history, has become routine. As so last week the Europe-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, just in time for Thanksgiving, declared the US to be a “backsliding” democracy.
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” it said.
The authors might want to have a look in their own backyard. The US is probably the least authoritarian place on Earth, right now.
Americans always have much to be thankful for, but this Thanksgiving Americans should be more thankful than usual they don’t live in Europe.
There, governments obsessed with Covid-19 appear intent on causing civil unrest by smashing their people with further rounds of destructive restrictions. There hasn’t been a mass Covid-19 demonstration, on the scale Europe or Australia have seen, in the US during the entire pandemic.
And there isn’t likely to be one. Covid-19 transmission is higher in a dozen US states than it is now in Germany or Austria, or Denmark, yet the thought of locking down is, thankfully, preposterous.
Americans can be thankful they can travel across their 50 states to see friends and family without being stopped at the border by police. They can come and go without being forced to “quarantine”. They aren’t required to “check in” anywhere.
Americans can be thankful their parliament, Congress, isn’t controlled by the government, as it often is in other jurisdictions, which makes it much harder for populist crazy ‘health’ decrees to be enforced.
And their courts are independent too. Last week a federal court struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate pending an appeal, a sign the Covid-19 industrial complex is starting to collapse.
So this Thanksgiving shouldn’t be just about Americans. It’s a time for the rest of the world to give thanks to the US as well, for keeping alive the possibility that we all might once again live like it’s 2019.
If there are more deaths from or with Covid-19 here, perhaps that’s the price of living in a free society. China might be safer from Covid-19, but few people are trying to migrate there to revel in the safety.
Checking in on the Australian news, replete with stories about people being carted off to camps as deranged politicians scream about the necessity of vaccine mandates, doesn’t offer much hope for a return to normal. Other parts of the world do.
In the meantime, I for one am thankful to be in the US this Thanksgiving.
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