I must admit that my first impulse upon writing this, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, is to implore you, if you are reading this, to stop, put it down, and go back to your friends, family and turkey. Pay your monthly subscription of course – but do yourself and your loved ones a favor and take a couple days break from politics, even from the brilliant and unerring analysis of that sordid genre that I offer each and every week. It’s okay, I’ll be back.

If you are still reading, my sympathies; I have nothing much better to do today either. So behold, a few notes on some of the events of the week.

The biggest news item of the week, of course, is one which ought not be political, or only tangentially so. The mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, left five people dead and 18 in hospital. It was yet another act of evil, as with all acts of evil the mind automatically reaches for an explanation. The location of the shooting suggested an easy and convenient one, that it was an act of extreme bias and hatred toward LGBTQ people. And it may have been. But we simply do not know the motive; what we do know is that the murderer is a profoundly sick human being who harbored a desire to kill, and to kill as many as he could. It has now come out that he is identifying as “nonbinary”, which would ostensibly put him in the same grouping as many of those those he sought to slaughter. Perhaps that is simply a new criminal defense ploy, maybe it was a contributing factor, who knows?

But the almost immediate reflex among many on the left to tendentiously blame conservatives and a reasonable resistance to planted axioms concerning sexual-identity politics is strikingly distasteful. One can raise serious questions about the propriety of exposing elementary school students to drag shows, or trans-gender involvement in girls sports, without wishing or provoking harm to the people of that community. Political violence has been committed by extremists both left and right, from Jan. 6, to the riots of the summer of 2020, to isolated individual acts here and there. But it is illiberal and dangerous to conclude that responsibility for the commission of crime lies in the voicing of even vigorously argued opinions on novel and controversial ideas and policies. This was a horrific and senseless crime, from which innocent lives were lost, bodies broken, heroes emerged and, hopefully, appropriate practical lessons, as opposed to reductionist ideological ones, are learned.

Even in the wake of tragedy and violence, we are called at this time of year to dip into our reserves of gratitude. And we do have much to be thankful for. The Ukrainians still seem to be winning. Taiwan is still free. Mankind may be going to the moon again. Outside Colorado, where the notion of a two-party system is but a reactionary dream of yesteryear, divided government has returned to Washington D.C., serving as a check on the extremist impulses of either side. The disappointing showing by Republicans earlier this month may result in a healthy purge of some of the more distasteful elements that managed to infiltrate the party over the last few years; and one retains an optimistic hope that the ideological and cultural excesses of the revolutionary wing of the Democratic Party will result in a similar cleansing in due course, before too much damage is done.

It should come naturally to us to express gratitude for what we are blessed with, and have been bequeathed with, in this nation, individually and as a people. And yet ingratitude is endemic in our society. To speak in non-critical tones, let alone with a measure of gratitude, of those who vouchsafed us the blessings of liberty, our civilization, laws, form of government, economic system and so forth, is condemned in more and more circles, often now officially. We speak of things like poverty, and oppressive government, and these are serious issues, with serious impacts on people – but those concepts take on an entirely different meaning in many parts of the world. Our shared patrimony is not without its faults – hardly so; but expressing ingratitude to the progenitors of modern liberty and order casts doubt on one’s commitment to freedom.

So for all of it – our institutions; our form of government; the rule of law; ordered liberty; the genius of Bach and Mozart; the beauty of the printed word;  the refined elegance of Keats, Wordsworth and Eliot; the miracles of modern medicine; the bewildering advances of technology; the baffling variety and array of entertainment now available; the abundance that permits Thanksgiving dinners; and the fortitude which causes a man to charge toward gunfire in defense of his community whether on a foreign battlefield, on the beat, or in a nightclub – I give thanks, above all, to God.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.