Glenn Beck took time out Wednesday to deliver a Thanksgiving message to his viewers.
"As you're gathering with your friend and relatives, I would ask that you would talk to your family and just watch your family and ask yourself what really matters," Beck said. "We need to use this holiday season as time to renew ourselves."
Beck said that it's not material things that matter but "our loved ones, our children, and the freedoms that are still intact." And he said that he is thankful the American spirit is one of individualism, not collectivism.
"I want somebody to recognize in Washington what America really is," Beck said. "It's not stuff! It's an idea, an ideal. It's the individual, but it's more than that. It's each of us with our families, our family values. A set of guiding principles by which we have lived and which we live our lives. And when we disconnect from those principles, well then, the country becomes a reflection of us. We must reconnect with those principles that our fathers and their fathers lived their lives for for the past 233 years."
Beck asked viewers to imagine a terrorist attack on Washington, DC — one in which "we would be as lucky as we were with the World Trade Center, when everybody was gone, or most people were gone" — and to realize that the monuments and symbols in the capital are "meaningless" because America is about individuals.
"We are Americans, rich or poor," he said. "We have always believed in the rugged individualism and self-actualization. We are not the people that I think the people in Washington think we are. We are not fearful people, we are not people to give in or give up. We are not about to give into some new whiny mentality...that's not who we are. The only one that is too big to fail is you and the only one that will create your failure is you. The only way the United States government, or the United States of America, or we fail as a collective is if we fail as individuals, and the only way to guarantee that we as individuals will fail is to depend on the government to prop us up. That is just not who we are. And for me, I am thankful for that."
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