On Thanksgiving

In college, one of my best friends was Furuz Amjahdi, a Kurd from Iraq. He came to the US with his four brothers to escape the Hussein regime. He often spoke of his parents and the fear that he would never see them, or his country again.

From Investors Business Daily:
Posted 11/22/2005

Thanksgiving: From the moment hardy New Englanders proclaimed a day, nearly four centuries ago, to celebrate Providence, Americans have known it at least inchoately: Freedom and gratitude go together.
But gratitude for what? Today we may be grateful for retractable landing gear that works. Or for finding a spare vacuum cleaner belt just hours before holiday guests arrive. We keep flying and socializing because of such mundane matters.

So the faith that certain things will work propels us onward. Our daily decisions, small or large, are uncoerced, bidden by expectations of growth and happiness. Sometimes we undertake difficult tasks, not in anticipation of reward, but because they are right.

In such cases, we are truly rewarded.

Just last week we noticed a television spot sponsored by Kurdistan, whose minuscule budget purchased such little time it could not have been widely watched by Americans. For 30 seconds the Kurds expressed their joy, and their gratitude.

To Americans. For their freedom.

Kurdistan, bluntly, was targeted by Iraq's Saddam Hussein for extinction. He gassed whole villages of these nuisance ethnics, leaving multitudes of gasping bodies lying in dusty streets, their corpses destined for mass graves. Thousands of others he killed through more conventional methods.

Today, as their delegates work out a constitutional relationship with Sunnis and Shiites in greater Iraq, Kurds live, dream and make personal choices in a comparatively tranquil state of their own. American forces — young men and women who volunteered for duty, some dying — made the Kurds' new freedom possible.
As our politicians and media activists debate the U.S. role in Iraq, they might pause this long weekend to meditate on America's essential selflessness. They might offer thanks for a country that seeks to extend freedom to tyrannized lands around the world.

Reality may dictate that we cannot liberate every oppressed nation, as the anti-war crowd taunts, but maybe we can help those within our strategic interest and reach.

We cannot keep our own freedom if we do not strive to extend it.

That is why — not just on Thanksgiving Day — we must remind ourselves of the singular importance of America. Informed by a tested philosophy that places human liberty above mere politics or power, America remains humanity's best hope. If that philosophy fails here, darkness falls across the globe.

If anything, we should thank the Kurds — for thanking us. It reminds us that American influence is a force for good in the world — a powerful, positive influence for freedom.

Much of our culture may seem frivolous. (Why do we need robotized cats, anyway?) But even our frivolity betokens our inventiveness and our freedom, planted here as if by intelligent design, by cosmic mirth, a lure and an inspiration to the world's oppressed.