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By Rick Jensen

Thanksgiving may officially be over, but Americans have much to be thankful for.

To my liberal and Democratic Party friends (not always one and the same), please enjoy the freedom you have to protest and fear the unknown that is President-elect Trump.

While Trump tweets and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence demonstrates calm maturity,

political opponents from “Saturday Night Live” to MSNBC, from the Broadway stage to the streets of Portland, all have the freedom to freak out, cry, pout and insult them in a variety of fashions, from rude and crude to self-aggrandizing.

In Cuba, one of the 167 political prisoners reported by the Associated Press is Yoelkis Rosabal Flores, a member of the Union Patriotica de Cuba, described by Amnesty International as a peaceful political party whose platform is in opposition of the Castro regime.

Flores was arrested in May, 2014 for staging a protest calling for the release of a fellow party member. Flores was charged with public disorder and sentenced to four years in jail.

Protesters and their families might just want to take a moment a be thankful that our Constitution and those who vow to uphold it ensure no citizen is jailed for years simply for protesting that their candidate did not win the election, thus continuing our peaceful transfer of power.

We’re thankful not to have been born in Maiduguri, Nigeria, the self-proclaimed caliphate of Boko Haram.

So many thousands of little girls and women have been kidnapped to be used as sex slaves that it’s estimated every family there knows someone whose daughter, sister, mother or wife was raped.

Americans were shocked by the news two years ago when 276 school girls were kidnapped by these Islamic terrorists. Today, most of them are still missing, and the girls who were rescued from being raped nearly every day are shunned by their own people.

Some were as young as 8-years-old.

And to think celebrated, adored Broadway actors are fearful… fearful… of a man who talks trash, is limited in power by two other branches of government and has begun building a cabinet including women and people who have disagreed with him.

To my conservative and Republican friends (not always the same), be thankful that we will not have four or eight years of mind-numbing Hillary corruption and scandals.

We will have Democrats and multi-million dollar Super PACS “investigating” and demanding Freedom of Information Act requests for tons of documents as they work to undermine the Trump Administration.

Even though Trump is not required to dissolve his companies or sell them and put the money into a blind trust, the political left will publicize as many appearances of business impropriety as scandals as well as any real scandals that arise.

And some will. After all, he’s Trump, not Walker or Cruz.

But be thankful Trump has promised to repeal Common Core. Any work to return education control to the local level is a blessing.

Let us also be thankful for the millions of Americans who put aside partisan politics, standing for the rights of others as decent, flawed human beings.

Thankful for the majority of Americans who refuse to acquiesce to racists believing Trump’s win is a win for white nationalists.

Thankful for the majority of Americans who refuse to accept black youth publicly beating white people because they may have voted for Trump.

While some in the media are giving white supremacists far too much publicity in their quest to equate these fearful people with our next president, let us be thankful for the majority of Americans who refuse to join their little cults who curse black people with the n-word.

Let us be thankful for what we do have and build upon it each day as individuals.

By Susan Stamper Brown

Watching the recent anti-Trump post-victory riots on television and the temper tantrums on social media, it’s become obvious that, without Divine intervention, the ever-fearful Millennial generation will become known as America’s Lost Generation.

As someone who has been forced to face a few of her biggest fears against her will, I can say with some authority that while everything you fear will probably never come to pass, those things which do can make you better. Safe spaces are the last thing these crybabies need.

During his first inaugural address in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke to fear before a justifiably fear-ridden nation during the Great Depression telling them, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Depression-era Americans were dealing with real fears like massive unemployment, homelessness and starvation. Families lucky enough to have jobs lost 40 percent of their income. Many people lost all their savings when banks collapsed, leaving millions homeless and hungry and resulting in a 50 percent rise in parents turning their kid’s over to custodial institutions to prevent starvation.

Additionally, upwards of 250,000 kids too young to leave home hitchhiked or rode the train rails in search of work or a better place to survive, unlike today’s coddled snowflakes blessed with full bellies and equipped with the latest iPhones who are currently in meltdown mode due to groundless fears over a duly elected president.

After the election, despondent snowflakes lit up social media with fear-filled updates about the world ending and how a Trump presidency would ignite racism. Meanwhile, many so-called “love trumps hate” Trump haters were burning cities, vandalizing cars and attacking innocent bystanders, sometimes simply because they were white, or, God forbid, Republican.

A fear of offending peers also caused them to remain silent when Twitter accounts erupted with calls for the assassination of president-elect Trump and vice president-elect Pence. The idea that blacks can be racist too is lost on them, even after viewing the YouTube video of a mob of black thugs pummeling an elderly white man to the ground, savagely delivering repeated blows to his head while voices in the background taunted, “You voted Donald Trump…Beat his a**… Don’t vote Trump.”

Our snowflakes also acknowledge fear over Trump’s take on immigration, although their coolest president ever, President Obama, “deported more people than any other president’s administration in history,”ABC News reports.

Evidently, some are so frightened by Trump’s victory they believe people must die, like the young Latina woman on cable news who said, “There will be casualties on both sides…because people have to die…Trump, enough with your racism. Stop splitting families. Don’t split my family.” Apparently, because he’s black, Obama can’t be labeled “racist” for deporting more than 2.5 million people between 2009 and 2015.

Trump’s words about borders and legal immigration send our delicate snowflakes into their respective safe spaces when they aren’t throwing temper-tantrums. They have no clue their safe spaces aren’t safe if ISIS sympathizers come calling as they’ve vowed to do. They fear a man who promises to make their safe spaces safer when he curtails the terrorism that’s skyrocketed domestically and worldwide under Obama.

Apart from a relative few, logic and rational thought is all but lost on what is at this point, America’s Lost Generation. Especially compared to America’s Greatest Generation, whose young people faced real fears, survived the Great Depression, then lined up in droves to fight in World War II. Or like the Generation Xers who were predominately the major heroes after the September 11 terrorist attacks as leaders of Flight 93’s revolt, first responders in New York City and patriots who joined the military to fight.

In sharp contrast and just as FDR alluded in his fateful first speech, too many Millennials have allowed “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” to prevent “needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”