What I'm thankful for

After the things at the very top of the list, here's what I'm thankful for this week / year:

I've lived in a small apartment by the water for the past fifteen months, and I'm thankful for the scenery I have out my back window every moment I'm home.  I can't stay in this place forever - and in all likelihood will search for something else, perhaps larger, within six months - but it has been a gift while it has lasted.

I'm thankful that Curb Your Enthusiasm came back for its eighth season, which has been solid from top to bottom.

I'm thankful that I'm only a few months away from making the last payment of the car I bought in college.  I didn't have a great deal of credit when I signed the papers, but then again at that point many more things than home mortgages were being securitized and under-reviewed.  Anyway, you're not likely to see me buying a house in the next year, but perhaps you will soon after that, and I hope the auto loan will reflect well on my prospects.  If not, the car and I have still had a number of memorable adventures along the west coast.

Although much of the public (myself included) is not always empathetic to the Occupy Wall Street cause, I am thankful for the conviction of those individuals.  In my lifetime I cannot remember a larger or more prolonged civil uprising.  In a 1998 book, Howard Zinn wrote:

Let us imagine the prospect - for the first time in the nation's history - of a population united for fundamental change.  Would the elite turn as so often before, to its ultimate weapon - foreign intervention - to unite the people with the Establishment, in war?...With the Establishment's inability either to solve severe economic problems at home or to manufacture abroad a safety valve for domestic discontent, Americans might be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another shuffling of the same deck...but radical change.

Zinn had clearly grown dismayed with the polical-economic order of the last quarter of the 20th century.  Today, I imagine he'd have even more cause for concern.  But a citizenry that speaks out is a good thing, and to me many voices with a broad set of demands are better than one coherent message that no one dares deliver.