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This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the
family and toast the friends and hoard the stuffing and curse the
airport security, remember to give thanks you are not G.W. Bush. Hey,
it's important.
1) Be thankful that you do not have to suffer
Dubya's massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps
of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning
string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all
over the planet.
For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of
the most reviled and openly disrespected major world leaders in modern
history. America has never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send a
president abroad. We cringe when the man takes the stage. We offer
humiliated apologies to our former allies, and to the 200,000 Bush/war
protesters in London, just last week.
In Bush's defense, it cannot be easy to be so
undeservedly powerful, yet so bumbling and inarticulate and globally
loathed for your abhorrent policies and hollow corporate agenda and
baffled doofus manner. This Thanksgiving, be grateful you are not him.
2) Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not
Iraqi. Be grateful you did not go from brutal scowling despot who at
least kept the damn lights on to brutish occupying army no one asked for
that is right now laying waste to whatever remains of your once
semi-proud oil-rich nation.
Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of
the estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians
killed to date by U.S. forces, not to
mention one of the untold tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were
hammered by our million pounds of billion-dollar ordnance in the first
few days of the massacre. Be grateful you are not dead in the name of
American political and petrochemical profiteering.
3) Give thanks you are not a member of the
much-abused U.S. military. Sad but true. Be grateful you are not right
now suffering that sickening sinking feeling that you are not, in fact,
protecting America from any sort of marauding terrorists, or defending
our honor, or our way of life, or guarding innocents from swarthy
evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.
But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable
henchman for the BushCo corporate regime, with the odds increasing every
minute that you will soon join the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or more
than 430 "necessary" dead U.S.
soldiers Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs
off the latest round of guerrilla bombings that killed another batch of
your friends. Support our troops. Bring them home right now.
4) Be grateful BushCo's ratings are slipping lower
than an SUV's mpg rating, and there is only one year left until he joins
his father as one of those embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged
scar on the heart of a wary America that other countries point to in
years to come and say wow that's a nasty scar where'd you get that, and
we reply, George W. Bush, and they go, oh my God, that's right. So
sorry.
5) Be grateful you are not right now in any way
related to, or serve as a spokesperson for, or are employed as one of
the apparently very deranged or heavily drugged plastic surgeons who
worked on Michael Jackson. This is a gimme.
6) While you're at it, give thanks you're not Paris
Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Bennifer, Britney, Liza Minnelli, Joan
Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann Coulter, Ashton Kutcher, Bill O'Reilly, Anna
Kournikova, Madonna or Mary Hart. These are lives you probably do not
want to lead. Give thanks your soul is not all withery and Botoxed and
that it still manages to radiate cool colors like one of those funky
cheesy fiber-optic lamps from the '70s.
7) Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to
blot out the sun. Or, for that matter, the moon.
8) Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive
ongoing Herculean effort on the part of numerous world governments to
rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender offerings of
the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array
of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring
trees and relentless merciless beauty.
9) Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly
continues to baffle scientists and confound astronomers and completely
entrance biologists and philosophers and poets. We still, for example,
have no idea why whales sing, or how long they live, or where blue
whales, the largest and most magnificent creatures on the planet, go to
mate. Be grateful for the Mystery.
10) Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes.
We must. Because it is under severe duress. To exercise it now, to speak
out against BushCo and war and global corporate profiteering, is a true
sign that you are a traitor and an al Qaeda operative and a personal
friend of Barbra Streisand. This is what they sneer at you.
Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news
sources like truthout.org. And commondreams.org. And alternet.org and
counterpunch.com and buzzflash.com and smirkingchimp.com and even Slate
and the BBC and The Onion. Cheney scowls, Rove oozes, Ashcroft would
love nothing more than to shut down the entire impious godforsaken
Internet. Be grateful they can only quiver and hiss and rattle their
chains. So far.
11) Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David
Foster Wallace. Don DeLillo. Maureen Dowd. Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald.
Tom Robbins. Starhawk. William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David
Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki
Murakami. Katha Pollitt. Et al. Thank you.
12) For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm
produce delivered to your door. For handmade whiskey-filled chocolate
truffles smeared over a lover's tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For
the return of Opus. For
Rufus Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L'Occitane honey
incense and the Apple iPod and "Six Feet Under." For Cate Blanchett, The
Sun magazine, The New Yorker, Peet's coffee and "Spirited Away."
13) Here is the big cliché. Here is the final
praise. It cannot be overstated: Despite an impressive assault on civil
liberties, despite savage BushCo attacks on everything from national
forests to air quality to rivers and oceans and water quality and health
care, despite attempts to numb the national consciousness overall, we
must give enormous, unfettered thanks for this incredible and
kaleidoscopic America.
Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful,
diverse, epic, multifaceted, multiorgasmic landscape on the planet
today. It's true.
We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume
it must be like this everywhere. But one quick trip abroad will only
serve to remind you and reinforce your devout appreciation for what this
country can offer, the free _expression_ and the religious autonomy and
the clean water and the good dentistry and the fresh produce and the
space to explore.
We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We
are bratty and insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we
balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature
preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and
community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and
lots of great bookstores.
14) Here is where you make you own list. Here is
where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness,
just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the
karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you
find.
Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don't need some
holiday to be deeply thankful for the radiance in your life. But, hey,
an opportunity is an opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks of
general gratitude are absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is
where the real flavor is.
There is one thing that all Americans should be
thankfull for, you and the above list of idiots are not running this
country.
The Iraqi people if they had a thanksgiving day
would also be thankfull for the above, if idiots like you were in charge
Saddam would still be torturing and murdering them
We give thanks that all the extreme left
wing/socialists can do is whine and lie about what real god fearing
people do. | 
