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...the Puritans had "a more elevated and complete view" of our social duties than the Europeans of that time. They took care of the poor, maintained their highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided education for everyone — through high school. The purpose of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know what's most important — his or her duties to their Creator — for themselves. Everyone must read in order that no one be deceived or suckered by others. This noncondescending egalitarianism was the first source of the American popular enlightenment that had so many practical benefits. "Puritan civilization in North American," our outstanding novelist/essayist Marilynne Robinson observes, "quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days"....

....In Robinson's Calvinist view, generosity, liberality, and nobility are all synonyms in the Bible, and they express even better than charity the virtue that distinguishes who we are. What's left our culture, with our surrender of the common celebration of Sunday — what impressed Tocqueville as our most precious inheritance from the Puritans — is the respect, and so the time, for the disciplined reading and reflection required for us to practice the social, civilized virtues that are the truest source of our happiness.

Just saw a local news blurb yesterday repeating the lie that the Indians fed the starving Puritans and they all had a Thanksgiving dinner . . . Can’t wait for today’s news this eve when they go to a hunger center instead of a home where the father earned the money for the family food . . . much better to show how awful this country is that we have to feed them at shelters . . . It’s an annual event on TV . . . plus when they say, “Today’s the day we give thanks,” they never say to WHOM we give thanks . . . waiting for them to say, “Today’s the day we give thanks to GOD.”

Next year we’ll say, “Today’s the day we give thanks to the Almighty Most Meriful Baby-Killing (but only if the mother wants them dead) Illegal Alien (who has yet to apply for a Selective Service number) Obama!” Can’t wait.