Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll reflects on GRATITUDE, INGRATITUDE and SHAME. She writes:

As I may have said here before – sometimes I feel like in 10 years I’ve said EVERYTHING here before – Thanksgiving is at least tied with 4th of July for my favorite holiday. First of all, the menu is hard to beat – Turkey, Gravy, Mashed Potatoes, Gravy, Cornbread/Hot Sausage Stuffing, Gravy, Squash, Cranberries, Scalloped Corn, Biscuits, and Gravy. With Pumpkin Pie and Whipped Cream, hold the Gravy. Hahaha – as if there’s any left! In my book, Gravy is a beverage!

Secondly, like 4th of July SHOULD BE, it’s a unifying all-American celebration of gratitude to our Creator and for the geniuses who thought up the very idea of America. Every religious person, regardless of race, creed or color, can take a day to make a mental checklist of blessings from The Almighty to celebrate with profound gratitude.

Atheists can just be grateful for good luck, I guess. I know several who are wonderful people who would be welcome at my Thanksgiving table any time. Although I do sometimes ponder what atheists yell out when sex is really good: “Oh unbelief! Oh unbelief!?” (This may be an observation of the great comic Demetri Martin – I watch so many standups that I sometimes do not know what is mine and what is unconsciously borrowed. If so, I apologize.)

One of our most joyous Thanksgiving feasts about 20 years ago featured the inclusion of recent Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. Our guests included a mother who had become a vegetarian because she had given any scraps of meat they were lucky enough to procure in the Former Soviet Union to her daughter. Both mother and daughter had waists tiny enough to make Scarlett O’Hara look pudgy. The daughter was in her mid-20s and had a rail-thin husband about the same age. Who knew that starvation can actually cause weight loss?

The daughter told me about the first time she entered an American supermarket, and not even one of the upscale ones. She was so overwhelmed by the quantity and variety of food that she became nauseated, dizzy, and fearful she might faint. She covered her eyes on both sides, like blinders on a horse, and went straight to Produce where she picked up one cabbage and two potatoes. With tears in her eyes, she paid for them and fled.

Anyway, they loved the Thanksgiving meal. They ate and ate. The husband had to go to work early the next morning and he said his co-workers would surely ask about whether or not he had enjoyed his first Thanksgiving. He was seeking the names of the various dishes, but I assured him that specifics did not matter. I told him that the proper cultural response to that question was simply to say, “I was STUFFED.” He found that odd, but I assured him that Americans prize QUANTITY greatly. He called me the next day to say, “Oh Zuzan! You were correct complittly! I said ‘I was stuffed,’ and the guys say, ‘how you know this words’?”

I keep reading that gratitude is even good for your health. Psychologists who treat depression and anxiety recommend keeping a little “Gratitude Journal” on the nightstand next to your bed. Before retiring for the night, they suggest you write just three things for which you are grateful into your journal. They say you will sleep longer and more soundly.

I would probably make my initial list lengthy and then just use ditto marks. The things for which I am grateful do not change much: Citizenship in the United States of America, the First Amendment (however in peril it is), the Second Amendment, which guarantees the First and all others, my beautiful family of origin that gave me a genetic inheritance as well as a moral one. my beloved husband and son, beautiful and steadfast friends, reasonably good health for a geezer, the opportunity to post a weekly column on Power Line, AND, last but far from least – the Total Friday Experience from the Commentariat – a free-wheeling virtual coffee klatch of fun, camaraderie, wit, wisdom, valuable factoids, and, yes, love and support.

Conservatives are the happiest people I know, particularly religious conservatives. I look at the pro-Hamas marches both on campuses and in Europe, and see throngs of miserable, shrieking, hysterical people. (Look at the repulsive face of Rashida Tlaib with her gums perpetually flapping to see evil personified. Does she look to you like someone you would enjoy spending even a minute with?) The pro-Hamas Europeans delight in accusing Israel of the most heinous crimes, including, but not limited to, “genocide.” And why is that?

Part of it is the invasion of millions of Islamic “migrants,” of course. But part is sheer ignorance. The craven media feeds that ignorance either by the deliberate omission of important context or the twisting of facts to suit whatever narrative is au courant. The New York Times and the BBC, to take just two examples, make Baghdad Bob seem worthy of a Pulitzer for journalistic accuracy.

If it weren’t so grotesque, it would almost be humorous that the Muslim world insists that the Holocaust is a myth made up by The Horrible Jooz. But at the same time, not ENOUGH Horrible Jooz were killed then and they intend to finish the job. Sigh.

I am not the first to notice this, but I believe that Europe contains a bottomless wellspring of SHAME which leads to “projection” on steroids. Europeans know exactly who it was that tried to wipe out an entire “race” and who came perilously close to succeeding. A German woman I met in Palm Springs, a guest of good friends of ours from Canada, said that when she found her deceased father’s SS Uniform hidden away in the attic, that she threw up. She had been told that their family knew nothing of the concentration camps.

Shame is a pretty unbearable emotion and one for which there is scant relief. So the sufferer tries to lay off some of the shame on others. “Sure, I did wrong, but look at THAT (guy, country, race).” The Europeans are desperate to offload their shame onto the thriving Israeli remnant that they did not manage to eliminate. “See? WE may have systematically murdered six million of you, but you Israelis humiliate Gazans by having checkpoints when they come to work for you. You are just as disgusting as we were.” Shame makes people do and say terrible things.

Lord knows what drives a Leftist loon like Susan Sarandon (may all her teeth fall out but one, and that should ache her…) to don a kefiyyah and say it’s great that Jews are scared, because now they finally will know how it feels to be a “Muslim.” Words fail me. Her Agency has dumped her, but maybe she can get a gig speaking at Hezbollah’s Salute to Terror Luncheon, if the bug-eyed old harridan can arm-wrestle Roger Waters for the microphone.

As for ingratitude, we need look no further than Ilhan Omar. She was plucked from likely early death in Somalia, educated in America, a Muslim Black woman elected to national office in this horrible, racist, sexist, Islamophobic land, not held responsible for lying to Immigration or marrying her brother. Yet with every breath with which she isn’t fund-raising from Hamas, she rails against her American benefactors. But enough of shame and ingratitude!

Today we are happy, if in somewhat of a diabetic, tryptophanic coma. Yesterday we celebrated the fact that Benjamin Franklin did NOT get his way in having the turkey named the symbol of our nation. It would be sad if once or twice a year we gathered our families together to chow down on the national symbol of our great land.

Moreover, if the turkey represented America – and not just most of its leaders — instead of a raptor expert sending majestic American eagles soaring at the beginning of a SuperBowl, the field would be littered with squawking, pooping turkeys! God forbid there would be a rainstorm where those turkeys would just tilt their beaks up, drinking water until they all drowned. Bummer of a game opener. And a dangerous, slippery field of play, worse than the ice on “The Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field.”