Thankfulness Thursday

I thought I was all smart and had this set to post automatically, apparently I was mistaken. Here it is a day late.


I am thankful this Thursday to be an American. In the last few weeks many examples of why have came to mind. Here are a few:
While I wasn't thrilled with many of the election results and ashamed at how candidates ran their campaigns; I am glad we have the democratic process. I am starting to think that the electorial college is an antiquated idea. It's frustrating to me to look at the 'Red/Blue' map of American broken into counties and you can quickly see the differences in rural and urban. Kinda sad that stating your case either for or against a candidate or issue is like speaking another language when the conversation is had between the two groups. I think that's mostly because our environments are so different, it's just hard to see the other side.
In my endeavor to not make this a political rant, I will continue. I'd like to share some of the other reasons I am thankful to live in this great nation of ours. I think freedom of speech is something to be thankful for as well. It allows me to create this blog. While sometimes on forums like Facebook you can see both the worst and best that freedom has to offer; its still a great tool to freely express our feelings.
Freedom of Religion is an important one in this household as well. While my family considers it to be part of our everyday life to practice the religion of our choosing, we forget how rare that is world-wide. We attend church weekly, pray daily before meals, with our family, in private and in public. It's hard to imagine that this basic part of our day isn't 'allowed' in other parts of the world.
I've been sort of going down through the Bill of Rights, and if I continue, this is likely going to get long, so instead I want to highlight just one more thing from this past week that makes me thankful to be an American.
Veterans Day was a few days ago. I had the privilege to see our district's youngest students honor our local vets. While there were extraordinary events/ceremony's going on throughout the day, this was the one I witnessed. That building had a coin drive. The ultimate goal was to sponsor a local veteran's trip to Washington DC on the 'Central Missouri Honor Flight'. That building has about 300 students. Those kids not only sponsored a vet, they collected enough to sponsor 4 vets! About $1500. Our youngest son was one of the kids involved in counting up the collected money, so  he and a friend presented the 'big check'. Then to see the Marine who received it get choked up by the generosity of these littlest kids, of course also made me cry; this was such a heartwarming example of what is good and right in this great country of ours.
Proud to be an American and God BLESS the USA,
From Tulip~
KH
:)