�Giving Thanks�

� We observe today a day of monumental opportunity.
� A symbolic day of appreciation, generosity, unity, renewal, and hope.
� Today, as we should everyday, we seek within our family and ourselves the very essence of the qualities of generosity.
� Today, as we should everyday, we remove ourselves from our trivial secluded thoughts, to realize how fortunate we truly are, rather than what we complain to be.
� Above all else, this is a day of irrefutable opportunity.

� Today of all days, we are called to act upon the global situations that we have absent-mindedly dismissed.
� While in the US, we are essentially free and equal; most of the 6 billion OTHER people of the earth are unable to fathom the liberties that we retain.
� Today, we must either take up the call for fundamental good, or continue down a path into indifference to suffering.
� We can stick our heads in the sand, hoping blindly that the world�s troubles will simply recede.
� We have done so in the past, and without consequence to ourselves, though the outcome has been the continuation of the pain and dismissal of liberties to those who require the most.
� The reason for inaction remains the same- that we cannot defend basic natural rights elsewhere if any action is controversial at home.

� In the early half of the newly-escaped 20th Century, more human beings were oppressed, liberties abused, and innocents slaughtered by the inaction of those with the power to prevent than those with the will to enact.
� When the Nazis wielded their influence in Germany for acts of intolerance, racism, and genocide, the �united� States of America failed.
� We were too xenophobic and divided among ourselves to prevent the single most brutal massacre within the history of modern civilization.
� The lives of 11 million were destroyed, not based on individual actions, but on any label determined to be �un-german.�
� During this time of evil and despair, what did the Jews have left to give thanks for?
� What did the gays, gypsies, Catholics, communists, capitalists, Jehovah�s witnesses, and the disabled held in those concentration camps have left to give thanks for? We may never know.
� My personal conviction is that they gave thanks for the future.
� Not their future, but their children�s, and their children�s, and their children�s future.
� They gave thanks for us, who now enjoy a present unimaginable for the victims of any genocide.
� A future where merit is not weighed by beliefs, or ethnicity, or religion, or politics, or dialect. A future where even those who�s family has never known peace can be an equal.
� Why exactly would we be given thanks?
� I believe the wisdom inherited by the people of the world out of the ashes of stupidity is worth giving thanks for.
� For us to squander any opportunity to fulfill our promise �Never Again� would be an unforgivable act of atrocity.

� Today, we must discover what the persecuted around the world have left to give thanks for.
� Today is our grandest call to return the hope of the millions who did not survive the holocaust, by preventing a movement, which can potentially reach the same proportions.
� I�m talking about Darfur, a province the size of Texas, where a people are being murdered because of their skin-color.
� In Darfur, a barbarous government-supported militia known as the Janjaweed has been �cleansing� Darfur of black Muslims since February 2003.
� Today, we can answer the call, not as Americans, but as humans, and prevent the growth of a genocide, which has claimed half a million people.
� So today, I give thanks for our ability to save others.
� This ability must immediately be exercised; otherwise the damage will be catastrophic.
� Let us not only give thanks, but also take action, for what is right.