Like many, I was raised in a traditional Catholic, Caucasian home, believing everything I was taught about the greatness of America and the Church. I was thankful for being born in the greatest country and raised in the greatest (and only TRUE) church. Erosion set in slowly for me. Living in the segregated South, it took me a while to recognize the imperfection of my nation's and my religion's treatment of minorities. Somewhere around age eighteen, I had the temerity to begin thinking for myself, which led to the end of my serious association with the Church of my youth. I actually realized that church is spelled with a lower case "c".
I learned that slavery really was the root cause of the "War of Northern Aggression", and that "states' rights" was a euphemism that would be used for decades to come to excuse intolerable behavior.
But some things really were good about being an American. (But, I'll let someone else think of something good about being Catholic, besides uniform skirts with shiny patent leather shoes). Special things like freedom of speech, a free and competent press, search and seizure restrictions, and habeas corpus laws. (CAUTION: This is not intended to be a complete or comprehensive list.) And every Thanksgiving, we stood around the groaning table and spoke glowingly about these blessings of liberty.
Boy, was yesterday a different kind of Thanksgiving. A litany of "things we are thankful for" was much shorter than in previous years and with some interesting additions:
Lord God, we thank you for this lovely, aromatic turkey, however we reserve the right to reconsider if Butterball recalls it tomorrow due to a salmonella scare. We thank you for the peas we are having instead of corn, because corn prices have been pushed through the roof by the ethanol industry, whose lobbyists continue to block the use of more reasonable sources of ethanol. We thank you for CNN and its willingness to counterbalance the conservative nonsense of Fox news... they don't do that anymore? Oh,okay...never mind. Thank you for the warm balmy weather, but gosh do we have to have the droughts and melted ice caps and all the rest of that stuff our leaders say Al Gore made up?
Yes, yesterday's prayer of gratitude was a bit of a challenge. As a football fan, I am grateful for Notre Dame's miserable season, but must my Dolphins be doing even worse? I am pleased that the Democrats are in the majority in both houses of what used to be a branch of government. Maybe by next year, actually using that authority won't be "off the table" anymore. So, unless I had wanted to get into being thankful for negatives like: thankful I'm not Michael Vick's dog, and thankful I'm not a gay guy in the Obama campaign, and thankful I'm not Britney Spear's ANYTHING, I really came down to one resounding THANK YOU.
THANK YOU, MERCIFUL FATHER, FOR THE 22ND AMENDMENT TO OUR CONSTITUTION.