by Charles Scaliger, The New American:

In a time of economic freefall, of rampant lawlessness on our southern border and in our cities, of dangerous new rivals abroad such as Communist China and Islamist Iran, and of a stubborn pandemic that has become a pretext for eradicating individual liberty, it might seem that Americans have little to be thankful for. Those of us whose memory reaches back a few decades find the America of today to be virtually unrecognizable, with a culture seemingly hostile to values and institutions once taken for granted. With a government now unable and unwilling to maintain even a semblance of civic order, public and private debt soaring to incomprehensible heights, and moral and civic virtue all but banished from politics and popular culture, the America that rose to become the greatest nation in history in the 20th century appears poised for collapse in the 21st. Small wonder, then, that in recent years, Thanksgiving has been reduced to a placeholder between two holidays that better epitomize consumption and secular festivity, temporary escapes from a world spinning out of control.