American gratitude: this past May, author Ben Stein gave the commencement address at Ithaca College. This was his advice to the bright young Americans gathered before him.

Here we are on this beautiful campus, in this beautiful part of New York, in this beautiful America. Every one of us in this place has plenty to eat (some, like me, have too much to eat), plenty to drink, and plenty of well-protected freedom and security. We can go out and protest Wal-Mart or the war in Iraq. We have warm beds in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. We can buy organic tofu, and we can fly on jet planes to see our parents. And we wake up and there's no Gestapo chasing us down the street or killing us because we're some unwanted minority. We're flee people in a flee and glorious country.

We have problems in this country; you'd have to be ...