Jihadist Thanksgiving

I have not visited my acupuncturist since the Paris shootings but I doubt the usual treatment will do much to calm my jangled nerves next time. Maybe I'll ask him to bring out the big needles from the back room that he saves for nuclear war, raging pestilence and ISIS gone wild. I hope he has some of those.

The fact that so many young people are so angry and filled with hate for the world that they can go out and slaughter complete strangers their own age by shooting them down like the Nazis did to the Jews (and gays and Gypsies, yes I know) during the Holocaust proves that it can happen again and is happening right now. Beyond disheartening, no word exists to describe it. (I would use "heinous" but that word's impact has been diminished by being part of the opening sequence of TV's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" cop show. )

The fact that all of them are of the Muslim faith or radical Islamic jihadists or whatever phrase Hillary Clinton dares to use without being accused of racial defamation or incurring the wrath of Obama is surely not a coincidence, yet we are all cautioned not to generalize about all the "nice" Muslims and all the "decent" followers of Islam, wherever they are hiding out since I have never seen any, certainly not in the news or on TV, railing against the "handful" (according to Obama) who are giving their religion a bad name.

Instead we are all supposed to be happily planning for next week's Thanksgiving dinners, ordering our free-range, all-natural turkeys and loading up on canned pumpkin, apples and pecans for the pies, yams, cranberry sauce, stuffing fixings, emergency turkey gravy and all the rest, in order to proceed with that hollow, ritualistic holiday as if nothing has happened to change our world, pretending we have so much for which to be thankful. I wonder what that might be for President Obama.