George-Washington-praying at-Valley-Forge

Happy Thanksgiving!I consider those two words to be inseparably linked. I don’t think you can be happy unless you are grateful for the good things in life.Going further, the source of most of the current unhappiness that is ripping our state and union apart is that so many people focus on their grievances, instead of their blessings.The framers wrote in the Declaration about certain unalienable rights among which was the pursuit of happiness. It is not an accident that the pictured framer who was out fighting in the field while the Declaration was being written and signed, proclaimed the first Thanksgiving in his first year in the office of president.George Washington understood that the key to the pursuit of happiness is an attitude of gratitude. In other words, the successful way to pursue happiness is to focus on your blessings, not your grievances.The root cause of most of our political problems, today, is that broken, miserable, lost people that have fallen into a downward spiral of always focusing on the negative are trying to bring the rest of us into their misery.These people are on a mission to make sure that those of us who focus on and work toward the positives in life are stopped by psychological manipulation using the tools of fear and guilt, or if necessary brute force to keep us from exercising our natural, unalienable rights to pursue happiness.I am grateful for much. In the political realm, I am grateful for our heritage of liberty and the example of the framers who had the courage to change the things they could, the patience to accept the things they couldn’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. I am grateful for their attitude of gratitude.I am grateful to them for writing the Declaration of Independence, thereby giving us a document that tells us the mission and moral grounding of our governments. I am grateful for written constitutions that that they created at the state and federal level that sought to bind governments down to secure our rights.And I am grateful that, although the window is rapidly contracting, we still have the freedom and power to stop those unhappy people who are using all their power and skill to try to ruin the happiness of the rest of us.