Special Blog Post: Thankfulness

On this Thanksgiving Day, I shall give thanks for many things. Above all else, though, today I must give thanks to one person for whom I am most grateful, a person of whom I have spoken many harsh words and for whom I have harbored much ill will. Today, however, I cannot but think of this person and be filled with gratitude, and it would be wrong for me not to express that appreciation, if only in summary.

I am thankful for our President, George W. Bush. I want him to know that; but more importantly, I want everyone to know that, and I want everyone to know why.

To Mr. Bush:

You, sir, have given me such a renewed sense of life, even as your policies have taken the lives of almost three thousand of my fellow Americans who are soldiers and perhaps 650,000 of my brothers and sisters in a land of which I knew little and cared less only six short years ago. I should be dispirited by such appalling carnage, yet I am curiously—perhaps troublingly—enlivened by the scope of this engine of death that has become my country.

I want it not to be this way; but in the effects of what you have done, I now have returned to something I had forgotten: you were always there.

I don't mean you, personally, but you as an attitude, a posture, a way of Americanism that had been lurking in the shadows all the years I was becoming complacent, all the years I was imagining a world becoming better. It was not; and it was not because you as a face of America had always been there waiting to return from the receding memories of Vietnam, Central America, and other places most people don't even know about.

I almost forgot, as I drifted into this century in a sort of self-assured, half-slumber of comfort about America's future.

You reminded me that my America is not everybody's America; and if I should want my America, I must be forever diligent, eternally at the guard, and permanently ready to fight for it, perhaps even with my life, which you, I am most certain, would be willing to take if I were to become too much a vexation to you and your kind.

I am thankful for you, sir, because I now know that my kind probably outnumber yours: for you to stop us from stopping you, you will have to hurt a lot of people. Several hundred men being tortured in horrible isolation from the world? Three thousand or so American GIs dead? Twenty or thirty thousand more wounded? Six hundred fifty thousand Iraqis who have ceased to breathe?

You haven't even begun to see what you'll have to do to stop the world from stopping you.

Even from the tiny hill upon which I stand here in cyberspace, I can see thousands upon thousands who share my revulsion at you. Not merely at your policies, Mr. Bush, but at you: you as a coward, you as a liar, you as a manipulator, you as a torturer, you as a breeder of death, you as a destroyer of America's future, you as a taker from the poor, you as a giver to the rich, you as a phony from the day you set foot on this good earth.

You have bound millions and millions to a vision of America radically at odds with your own; and in so doing, you have made many of those people realize that they really do love that America, the one with broad and ever-expanding liberty, the one where laws compel the enforcers far more than they do the masses, the one ever striving to the promise of a living constitution that commences with a long bill of rights, not a summary manifesto of repression. I could not have hoped for a man whose America is so vile that he would make so many strive so hard for a nation so fundamentally different from that.

You have made patriots, Mr. Bush, the kind who will not yield their country to an outcast from a bleak, brutish land of cruel people. You have made patriots of tens of millions, not just here in the United States, but around the world. Have you any idea how grateful the world will be when you are finally removed from the stage and sent back to the shadows whence you came? Have you any idea, sir, how many people around the world will celebrate, certainly with great caution, the return of hope that this nation can lead by moral principle and not by incompetent violence? The world needs the United States, and the world will once again have it, staggered, poorer, a bit humbler, and all of that to the better if it is to pose as the wise and chastened leader.

I am thankful for you, Mr. Bush. You have made me once again the patriot I once was, and in this renewed vigor to a better world, I am willing to withstand you, and I can do so in no small part because you have made so many, many others utterly resolute in reclaiming this nation and, indeed, this world from your kind.

May you have a good and bountiful Thanksgiving, George W. Bush; and may you be secure in the thought that you are appreciated so much by me, as I contemplate the world and this republic in the hard and joyous task of rebuilding this nation from the shattered land you have made of it. I shall in that glad time, then, end my days pursuing the purpose that was reborn in the time of your tyranny; and every one of those days of that future, I shall rejoice in the certain knowledge that you and those like you can do no more harm, at least until a future generation falls into that slumber of complacency.

The Dark Wraith has spoken.