With November comes Thanksgiving and the traditional holidays that follow. It gives 
us a chance to take inventory of our blessings. This year, however, more so than in 
the years following World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, we've been sliding faster and 
faster into that infamous melting pot. And if we have concerns, then truly we have a 
lot of soul-searching to do.  With most of the old ones gone, are we still surviving 
as two-language families? If not, then how far have our chldren distanced themselves 
from our culture and heritage? And if we could, would we try to retrieve our past or
 have we surrendered it to the foretold, "white massacre" that presently engulfs us? 
 Unfortunately, we can only speak for ourselves. But without professional surveys or 
psychological studies, I believe most of us with more than three generations under
 our belts, would agree that we have lost a lot of ground. And I place the larger 
part of this blame on our Apostolic religious leaders who place more importance on 
maintaining their religious dominance than on the permanence of our faith and
 culture.  Heck! We were more Armenian when our short-sighted Armenian politicals 
were at each other's throats. Was that due to the fact that we have a death wish 
about being an Armenian, or were we initially proud of being Armenian because we 
were fortunate enough to see what being a real Armenian was because of our old ones?
  No doubt we're all aware of those sixteen controversial words by President George
 W. Bush that catapulted us into our pre-empted war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. 
 "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
 quantities of uranium from Africa."  We have since learned that our own CIA had 
advised our President that they had no such information in their findings and advised 
the President of the probability that the information could be false. To date, 
after bullying our way across Iraq, we have found no weapons of mass destruction
 nor any evidence that Saddam Hussein was in the market for uranium from Africa.
As a result, President Bush's former popularity has been suffering because of it.  

What does this have to dowith our diminishing Armenian presence? Simply this. We 
also have been hearing eight ill-founded words trumpeted from both Etchmiadzin and 
Cilicia Sees that, in my opinion, does as much irreparable harm as President Bush's 
sixteen infamous words. Both of our present Catholici have stated from time to time 
that even though we are physically divided, that "we are religiously one and only 
administratively divided."  These words may have been accepted in the nineteenth or
 early twentieth century at the height of our political indifferences, but in today's
 post cold war diaspora where unity should be in process, we find ourselves further 
divided. In short, were these sacrilegious eight words meant to be a non-negotiable
 treaty between two unforgiving combatants or were they some form of betrayal? 
 This Thanksgiving, instead of letting our sky pilots pray for us, let us pray for 
them. Let us pray that they find their way back to true Christian unity and 
thereafter to revitalize our eroding Armenian past.

Joseph Vosbikian