Glass way more than half full

This Thanksgiving season, no one has more reason to be grateful than us. Though the media, politicians, Hollywood and a growing number of cap-in-hand special interest groups would like you to believe otherwise, Americans enjoy an unrivaled degree of prosperity. Even the 12.5 percent of Americans identified by the census bureau as poor are well off by world standards. Forty-three percent of all poor families own their own homes. The average poor American enjoys more living space than the average Londoner or Parisian. Three quarters of poor families own a car. Ninety-seven percent have a color television (more than half of the families have two or more televisions). A majority have cable TV, a VCR or DVD player, a microwave oven, and air conditioning.

These government statistics, compiled by the Heritage Foundation, paint a different picture of the downtrodden than does the nightly news, but the facts do not tell the whole story. Without a comparison of how other people live around the world, Americans have no real sense of just how grateful they should be.

Unfortunately, Americans don’t get out much. Roughly a quarter of US citizens hold passports. I’m probably safe in assuming that more of my countrymen watch American Idol than BBC World News. American myopia creates a skewed perception of reality. America’s poor families have homes, cars and televisions. The poor in most of the world have little or nothing. Completely destitute in America means finding a shelter where you can have a warm bed, a meal and the help you need to get back on your feet. In Haiti, the poor are baking dirt into cookies to fill their stomachs.

In America, if you lose your job there are “help wanted” signs up and down the street. The jobs may not be optimal but they’ll do until something better comes along. I’ve certainly done my time behind a register and sweeping a broom and I’ll do it again if I have to.

No such option exists for people in Zimbabwe where the unemployment level is 80 percent. There are no jobs. Government corruption and control of the market have reduced this once prosperous nation to abject ruin. Zimbabwe is far from the only country to strangle its economy with government regulation. The world average for unemployment is 30 percent. In the U.S. it is less than 5 percent.

America’s clean air and water may look dirty if you don’t know better. In Cairo, every breath I took was like sucking off a tail pipe. I found myself smoking Egyptian cigarettes just to get the taste of the air out of my mouth. Cairo took 2nd place in the Progressive Policy Institute’s Smokiest Cities contest with 159 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air. By comparison, Los Angeles, America’s most polluted city has 36 micrograms of particulate matter.

Breathing in the Egyptian capital was tough but drinking the tap water was out of the question. I drank bottled water and ate oranges, a fruit hermitically sealed by its own peal. Cairo was a great place to visit and I’ll go again, once my lungs have healed.

Should I need any medical help along the way, I’ll get it here, thank you. Americans have access to the best health care in the world. In developing countries, people die for want of penicillin or routine vaccinations. In socialized European nations and our neighbor to the north, citizens can get decent care if they have the time to wait for it.

According to the Frasier Institute, a Canadian think tank, Canadians wait on average nine weeks between getting a referral from a general practitioner and actually seeing the specialist. They then wait another nine weeks to get treatment. A cancer radiation referral takes five weeks, orthopedic surgery nine months.

My point here isn’t to browbeat readers into gratitude but to give a needed perspective. Ignorance is not bliss. An ungrateful heart is an unhappy one. It leaves people vulnerable to being misled by honey-tongued politicians promising to make them richer, healthier, and happier. In the places where the government tries to give people these things, it inevitably makes them poorer, sicker and less free to seek their own happiness.

This Thursday I gave thanks to God for the many blessings in my life including my beloved country. I joined with those who, in the words of George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, “unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection...for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed...”

Krista Kafer is a Denver-based education consultant, frequent cohost on Backbone Radio, and regular columnist for Face the State.com, from which this is reprinted by permission.

Thanksgiving honors founders' faith

For anyone born in the last 50 years, "separation of church and state" is inculcated secular orthodoxy. I well remember the family discussion during which my dad informed me that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution, and I recall spending the next two hours searching my history books in futility to prove him wrong. That government is insulated from faith is a notion that survives only in historical ignorance. Perhaps nothing disproves this fallacy more effectively than Thanksgiving Day, an official government holiday established for the purpose of acknowledging God's blessing of America.

Abraham Lincoln instituted a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, proclaiming:

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

"But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."

Lincoln deemed it "fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and once voice, by the whole American people."

Secularists, atheists and revisionists try to obscure these declarations of national faith, but Lincoln's sentiments echo those of our Founding Fathers.

The Continental Congress declared the first National Thanksgiving Proclamation on Nov. 1, 1777, so Americans could "express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor; and that together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join (in) the penitent confession of their manifold sins ... that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance."

When the "father of our country," George Washington, issued a similar decree in 1795, he declared it "our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we (have) experienced."

Despite our collective and individual shortcomings, Americans have prospered like no other people, but we are foolishly misguided if we believe that our freedom and longevity is the result of mere chance or that it can persevere without demanding sacrifice, humility and resolve from each of us.

Liberty, equality and freedom have certain biblical roots, and although our forefathers practiced divergent faiths and a few exhibited little faith at all, they were unified by an acknowledgement that only a faithful people is capable of self-governance.

In the 21st century, Americans continue to demonstrate a pervasive belief in God -- a faith that comforts and unifies us when tragedy and adversity remind us of our vulnerability.

Patrick Henry testified to Christianity's role in the birth of this nation and its capacity to co-exist with other faiths: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and free worship here."

Our ongoing struggles, though sometimes painful and heartbreaking, are not exceptional when compared to the suffering endured by those early colonists who dared to oppose the global superpower of that day.

On this Thanksgiving Day, we must remember the source of those patriots' strength and cultivate it for future generations.

Want to fireproof your marriage?

In the new movie "Fireproof," Caleb is a fire captain and Katherine is PR director for a hospital. Their marriage is crashing after seven years. Whose fault is it? Probably more his than hers, but it's not clear. He has an anger problem and a pornography problem. She's aloof, too perfect, and has a wandering eye at work. But when Kat asks for a divorce, it's Caleb who digs in to fight for their marriage, with encouragement from his dad, a new Christian. "The Love Dare," a 40-day rescue plan, is what slowly turns him, and the relationship, around.

Through plot twists we learn that the rescue plan has been found to work as well for a woman on the brink as for a man, and for couples a generation older than the young Holts. Caleb's lieutenant, a black guy named Michael, turns out to have it together a lot better both spiritually and maritally than his boss.

While the movie makes a direct but non-pushy evangelistic appeal, this isn't church or a revival meeting -- it's terrific entertainment. What could be a heavy couple of hours is deftly lightened by Kat and Caleb's funny coworkers at the hospital and the firehouse, as well as by the deadpan neighbor who is always outdoors at the wrong time.

"Fireproof" was shot on a shoestring budget and with few professional actors. It's the third feature film from Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, which previously shook up the cinema world with "Facing the Giants." At their website, FireproofMyMarriage.com, the "Love Dare" book is also for sale.

Donna and I loved this movie because, like most couples, we've had to learn a lot of lessons about marriage the hard way. We're encouraging all our friends to see it and talk it up. Its theater run won't be very wide or long, given the bias of Hollywood and big distributors toward a totally different ethic and message. Catch it while you can, or if necessary, get the DVD later on. This one's worth owning and seeing again!

Islamic guilt trip rolls on

Religious bias filings in the workplace are on the rise, according to the Wall Street Journal. Here's the link for their 10/16 story.. One must put this in proper perspective: such filings by Muslim groups constitute “classic cultural jihad”. Muslim groups will put continual pressure on employers and local officials to accommodate their culture and traditions with the intention of slowly but surely replacing ours entirely. This is the publicly announced long term Muslim goal.

The normal reaction of most decent Americans is to be non-confrontational, to try to compromise, to dialog, and to “reach out and understand”. The Muslims interpret this as weakness and push even harder. The key: Muslims feel morally superior to us, and have nothing but contempt for us. They have no problem cynically using our traditions of religious liberty and common decency to posture as “persecuted victims” and to strive to destroy the very liberties of which they are taking advantage.

If we wish to even have an America in 50 years, we will have to resist each and every encroachment. Look at Holland! They have tried to appease Muslim demands for 30 years. The result: Dutch culture is on the verge of disappearing into an Islamized Western Europe.

Bunyan replies to Peale

Editor: Answering Dose 1 below, Crater signed this one John Bunyan, identifying with the author of "Pilgrim's Progress." Dave Crater writes:

Interesting you should take Dr. Peale as your namesake - there is the "power of positive thinking" irony in your note of course, but more substantively there is the hollowing out of Christian faith in the 20th century in which Dr. Peale was at the center.

It is that hollowing out which has been bearing bitter fruits like our current ones for about a century now - where faith in God becomes merely "positive thinking," belief in free markets and property rights becomes merely welfare state "capitalism;" where a government that tries to play God then plays the savior from the economic disasters it causes; where economic and financial understanding becomes merely "monetarism" or "Keynesianism" or, as Larry Kudlow wrote this morning, "we need government to act in order to fix the free market"; where genuine compassion and private generosity become merely taxation and wealth redistribution; where personal responsibility and moral hazard get pushed off to a later date when we've solved the latest crisis caused by the dearth of those very values; when political statesmanship becomes merely Barney Frank; and where republicanism and Republicanism become merely John McCain.

We'll never get the politics right until we get right who God is - hint: He's not in Washington - but from a political standpoint, "neoconservatism," a modern incarnation of the classical principles of conservative thought, has been more observed by the Bush administration in passing and in the breach than in the observance. It is the answer, not the problem.

Responses to your notes:

1. Agreed. The race is over.

2. Ditto. Perhaps now we can stop the empty cheerleading among the GOP political classes? McCain is pathetic - there is no other word for it.

3. GWB as right as ever on Iraq and history will remember him so. GWB as wrong as Hoover on financial crisis, what causes it, what fixes it, and what economic leadership is, and history will remember his $700 billion bailout as simply another weak capitulation to 20th-century statism.

4. GWB indeed a shell - the kind of shell that has taken a steady beating for doing what is right (Iraq), then instead of permanently choosing the right side of the street and building on this foreign policy conservatism a coherent and courageous set of socially and economically conservative initiatives, a la Reagan building himself and the nation a genuine legacy in exchange for the unavoidable public relations beating in the media, he routinely sells out to welfare state expansion and economic statism, trying like McCain to drive in the middle of the street and getting himself hit by traffic going in both directions. He, the nation, and the GOP have suffered inordinately as a result.

5. Agreed, though few will understand where they actually went wrong. See aforementioned dearth of economic understanding rooted in dearth of spiritual understanding.

6. Those who maintain traditional Christian faith sleep peacefully amidst the confusion, for the Almighty is still in His temple. Psalm 2 comes to mind: "Why do the nations rage, and the people plot a vain thing?"

7. We should align with traditional (i.e., true) faith and classical (i.e., true) political conservatism. That means no more John McCains, Bob Doles, or Gerald Fords - how much mediocrity do we have to endure before we recognize what it looks like?

8. "A bit more deflation"? Deflation ended 5 years ago. Commodities are at twice their historic levels - we are well into a period of inflation.