Still thankful for the best country on Earth

Americans began celebrating Thanksgiving long before there was a United States. For hundreds of years, the colonies celebrated a day for local communities to come together and give thanks to God.

It was not until the height of national division, during the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln first set a uniform date for the nationwide celebration of Thanksgiving.

“In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity,” Lincoln wrote, “order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.”

Lincoln went on to note that the Civil War had not prevented settlers from expanding the nation’s borders, nor slowed the development of the land's natural resources, nor stopped the population from continuing to grow. “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God,” Lincoln wrote, “who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

There is no civil war today as there was when Lincoln first set a national day of thanks, and thank goodness for that. But the nation is clearly divided to an extent perhaps not seen since then.

Woke police have so captured higher education and corporate America that most people are now scared to speak their minds in the classroom and at work. And forget about a president mentioning the “Most High God” in a proclamation; that simply is no longer acceptable. The First Amendment has never been in greater danger.