The Last Best Hope

One of the most important virtues that we as humans must possess is gratitude – being thankful for the things that we have and not resentful for the things that we do not have. This is why Thanksgiving is such an important day. Cicero said, “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” When you approach life like everything is a gift, it brings out other virtues like love, courage, compassion, forgiveness, generosity. Gratitude makes us all a better person. That is why it is very disheartening to see so much lack of gratitude, so much resentment and envy that is permeating our society. For most of us living in the United States, the things that we should be grateful for will far outweigh those that we could be resentful of. According to the Foundation for Economic Education, the poorest 20 percent of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. If the US “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the richest in the world.

It is good to live in America, even if you are poor. Yet, there are too many people in our country who do not appreciate what a blessing that is. There are too many people who continually point out that others have more than they do, and how much of a victim they are because of it. These people always talk about other people’s privilege without ever acknowledging their own privilege – the privilege of living in the United States of America, a country like no other country that has ever existed. That is why we continually hear about white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, religious privilege, socio-economic privilege, able-body privilege. It is all designed by the left to create resentment and envy, and suffocate gratitude. The everyone gets a trophy generation has spawned this lack gratitude and resentment. When you’ve never earned anything, it’s easy to write off others’ success as privilege.

This resentment mentality is the reason why so many Americans are gravitating to politicians like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdoni, who are attempting to turn our free-market capitalist country into a socialist and communist nation. Socialism and communism are rooted in envy, which always spawns from lack of gratitude and lack of thankfulness. Winston Churchill once said, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” At the heart of socialism, is envy. It says, ‘let’s not be thankful for what we do have, rather let’s be resentful that others may have more than we do, and therefore, let’s implement a system that makes everyone equal.’ Churchill went on to say that "the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” Socialists do not care if everyone is miserable, as long as everyone is equally miserable; just as they are not thankful when everyone is blessed, if everyone is not blessed equally. Margaret Thatcher put it this way, the socialists “would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich.” And you can only arrive at that place, if you are focusing solely on what you don’t have and not on what you do have.

We see this dichotomy between lack of gratitude and victim entitlement in the people the left are importing into America. The immigrants who have been brought here by the Democrats demand free housing, free healthcare, free education, and free SNAP benefits, and rather than saying thank you, they go out on the streets and burn our flag, and protest the very country and the very system that created the prosperity, which provides them with the free housing, healthcare, education and SNAP benefits. The lack of gratitude for being in America drips from these modern-day immigrants, and that is one of the main reasons why the majority of American citizens want them deported. They refuse to assimilate and then have the audacity to try turn our successful country which saved their lives into the failed country with the failed political system that they escaped from, i.e. Ilhan Omar. Donald Trump summed it up best when he said of Omar, “I love these people that come from a place with nothing. Nothing, no anything. And then they tell us how to run our country."

But there is another group of people in our society, who we need to save our country from the Ilhan Omar's and the Zohran Mamdani's, but will be unable to do so because they are currently displaying a complete lack of gratitude. These people are often referred to as “incels” – young men in our society who have basically given up; they have given up on their career, given up on the dating life and relationships, giving up on any type of ambition to live a better life. They believe that somehow, they have become a victim in the new structuring of society over the last 20 to 30 years. The true sign of a lack of gratitude is playing the victim – woe is me, look how hard my life is. You think you have it hard – think back about the coal miner living in the 1950’s who left high school at age 17 and spent the next 40 years in a mine, digging up coal only to die of black lung at age 60. He would trade his life for your life in a second.

Do you think that opportunity is just going to walk up and jump in your lap? You have to make your opportunities. You don’t quit. Quitting is a sign of lack of gratitude. Incels are a bunch of cowards. They are the exact opposite of men. Men don’t play the victim. When I was growing up, it was an insult if someone accused you of playing the victim, now we have young men embracing victimhood, like it’s a badge of courage. I get it. Maleness has been vilified in our culture, if you do anything traditionally male, you will be accused of toxic masculinity. Who cares what these people think or accuse you of. Get over it. You’re men, be men. Men don’t give a damn what some chirping Karen says. Why do you think Donald Trump has been so successful? He actually has a backbone. He doesn’t let the Karens or the soy boys knock him off his game. He says and does what he believes is right without apology and look how disarming that is to those people.

As much as I disagree with them, at least the communists try, they give effort, actually they’re unrelenting in their effort to make changes in society. I disagree with every single one of those changes, but I admire their effort. And currently, they see an opening, an opportunity that they are more than willing to exploit. And that opening was created because we have young men in our country who are content with just laying around playing video games and smoking pot all day rather than attacking life, creating opportunities, making themselves better, and making our country stronger. The socialists, the communists, the Islamists are going to take over this country because of the lack of gratitude from the very people who are able to stop them. If you think life is hard for young men now, wait until the communists takeover.

The United States of America is being lost because of the collective lack of gratitude for the United States by its citizens. We will only realize how ungrateful we were when it is finally lost, and we can never get it back. Ronald Reagan once referred to the United States as the “last best hope for man on earth”. He was absolutely right. And we must show our gratitude for America by our willingness to fight to preserve it. Today is a day to be thankful but today is a day to fight for what we are thankful for. Don’t allow some Karen or soy boy to tell you how bad America is at dinner today. Stand up, you know the facts, you know the truth and spit it back in their faces. Don’t worry about losing friends, who wants to be a friend with someone who hates America. I don’t.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.