Great Question - What's more important: being able to shoot a 25 foot jump shot or...

...being able to solve a quadratic equation? Which is going to strengthen our country more.

Dr. Ben Carson writes:

"Many teachers have told us that when we put a Carson Scholar in their classroom, the GPA of the whole class goes up by as much as a whole point over the next year, because now the kids have something else to focus on. They begin to realize they can get just as much attention for solving a quadratic equation as they can for shooting a 25-foot jump shot. Those are the kinds of things that will strengthen our nation."

Dr. Carson has a book out which may be worth reading: America the Beautiful.

And Happy Hanukkah to you, Dennis.

Dennis Prager recounts his trip to Morocco when he was 20 and discovered that although he was a practicing orthodox Jew, he missed Christmas, and, therefore, America.

When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred.


What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family — after all, I hadn’t been with family or friends in England for the previous three months. And it wasn’t about being alone — I had gotten used to traveling by myself.

This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.

And:

I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to deny the existence of Christmas — for example, we had school on Christmas Day, and “midwinter vacation,” as it was called, was at the end of January, not at the end of December — this yeshiva boy really liked the Christmas season.


And, second, this Jew, whose yeshiva upbringing taught him to think of himself only as a Jew, was in fact an American as well.

Though it took more than a few years to fully realize just how deeply American I was and how much I appreciated American Christianity, it was Christmas in Morocco in 1968 that first opened my eyes. And I was never the same.

Americans

What a great story about the American girls' Soccer team's human concern for their Haitian opponents:

Bree said she and her teammates started strategizing almost immediately about how to handle the Haitian girls. They weren't thinking of what kind of offense to run or how to shutdown Haiti's leading scorer. They were thinking about what they could do as a team to help the Haitian girls ease what must have been, Bree and her teammates thought, an unimaginable pain.


"A lot of my teammates talked about doing a fundraiser or something to help them," Bree said.

U.S. Soccer caught wind of the girls' concerns and stepped in to help them. They decided to collect as much soccer gear and clothing and toiletries and whatever else they could pack up and carry to Costa Rica as gifts to their Haitian counterparts as they could.

"I got my high school team and my club team to donate toothpaste and toothbrushes and goalie gloves and cleats," said Bree, a St. Petersburg, Fla., native.

They divided up the gifts into individual backpacks for each of the girls on the Haitian team and took off for Costa Rica.

Of course, this story is typical of Americans, and it demonstrates an American trait that we ought to celebrate.