I know you’re prepared for serious amounts of snark, here, but you won’t be getting it. I am truly grateful for country I live in, the United States of America. There are any number of reasons. To start with, the fact that we are a republic based on a written constitution that has stood for 227 years without being scrapped and rewritten from the ground up is pretty amazing. Granted, the Constitution is sometimes honored more in the breach than in the observance thereof, but I think that is itself something to be proud of and grateful for. We can pass all kinds of laws, and choose to enforce the ones we’ve already passed selectively or not at all, even in bold ignorance of the Constitution, so long as we’re all pretty much OK with it.

But if anyone is not OK with it, we have mechanisms in place by which they can raise their hands and say, wait, that’s unconstitutional, and have their claim heard and evaluated by a more-or-less independent panel of highly-qualified judges.

There’s more to be grateful for. We’re an incredibly rich country, by almost any measure. We have immense natural resources, including mineral wealth, vast farmlands, and scenic wonders. We have an enormously diverse and talented population, representing just about every ethnic group on the planet. We don’t have an official language, nor does our unofficial one have an official body that rules on what is correct or incorrect usage, which keeps us flexible, if nothing else.

America is where jazz and the blues and rock-n-roll were born. America has produced so many great novelists that I hesitate to name any because of all the ones I’d have to leave out. (OK, I’ll name Mark Twain. He’ll have to stand in for all the rest.) America produced the German chocolate cake, for crying out loud! How can I not be grateful for that?