An Immigrant's Thanks to America

As I get older I appreciate more and more that life is a process of lucky breaks and of successfully dodging bullets.

What a lucky break that my dad, who worked in export for the British electrical manufacturer AEI (now defunct), and got sent out to Denver in 1965 to assist in a wacky electric generation project. 

And so I got to fly out from my first term at the University of Leeds in England to Denver in December of 1965. And I still remember the glorious Colorado dawn viewed from my parent's apartment on 8th & Clarkson on my first morning in the good old USA.

Then we headed out on 6th Avenue in my dad's 1955 Olds 88 and up into the Rocky Mountains on US 40. And so, as soon as I graduated from engineering school in 1968 I immigrated to the United States of America and became a citizen as soon as possible in 1975.

What a lucky break that, with my parents living in India in 1947 the Indians were too busy killing each other in "communal" riots over partition to worry about killing the imperialist Brits, and that we all got out alive in 1948 and returned to Britain.

What a lucky break that my mother, born and raised in Japan, got out in 1940 to "help" her sister with her new baby in Calcutta, India, a comfortable year before Pearl Harbor.

What a lucky break that my father, born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, got out in 1918 before the full force of Leninism and civil war could suck him up and destroy him.

Of course, the fact is that we are all the result of lucky breaks and dodged bullets, because if any one of a dozen events had gone the other way none of us would be here.

And so I look on the lucky breaks of my life and my ancestors and marvel.

And now I have six grandchildren, thanks to my two whip-smart accomplished daughters, and now I know that the meaning of life, the universe and everything, is grandchildren.

It's easy to get discouraged by the stolen election, by the Woke Reign of Terror, by the stupidities of Democratic governors imagining that you control an epidemic by keeping people out of churches, by the deficit, by the looming horrors of unfunded entitlements, by the blindness of the Great Reset and Building Back Better. All these inanities will cost us, although I expect they will cost me personally less than ordinary American commoners, to say nothing of "women and minorities hardest hit." And we will not get past the inanities and injustices of today until our liberal friends see disaster and ruin staring them in the face and the American people turn away from them with disgust and scorn.

But meanwhile on this Thanksgiving Day we are still Americans, the best people in the world. We still live in the United States of America, the best country in the world. 

And we ain't seen nothing yet.