How To Get A Birthday Card From Queen Elizabeth

[indianasmith]

I admire the British, not for their monarchy - although I do think the monarchy is a valuable system of tradition and national unity - but for what they did for the world.  With the exception of the Islamic nations, whose religious traditions are largely incompatible with Western democratic tradition, wherever the British flag once flew, democracy has flourished.  The British were the first in Europe to get the hang of representative self-government, and they planted those seeds wherever they planted their flag.  For that, and for their courage and sangfroid in the face of danger, the Britons have always been heroes of mine.

I think Churchill would weep to see what is happening to his beloved island.

[Trevor]

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24479054-2,00.html

It's easy! Just live to be 105, and never ever have sex!

I don't ever think I'd live that long, but it would be nice. To get a card from the Queen, I mean, not abstain from sex for 105 years. 

[BTM]

My Great-Grandmother got one.  (Canadians can get them too: you just need to inform the proper offices).  It was on the occasion of her 100th birthday - which was actually her 104th, as near as we can figure.  (She lied about her age for a few years - yes, in her 90's, she was very vain! -  until somebody told her she would receive birthday greetings from the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Governor General when she turned 100.) 

Wow.. you'd think once you live past 80 or so you'd be happy to just be ALIVE and not care about lying about your age anymore...

(shrugs)

[frank]

Circus -

not to turn this rather silly thread into a total downer, but your attitude is sadly typical of the societal illness that is destroying everything that once made Europe great.  In England, France, Germany, and throughout the continent, young Europeans have been raised to s**t upon everything that made their nations great in history.  God was expelled from Europe after World War One, nationalism bit the dust after World War II, and now there is nothing left in Europe for anyone to believe in - except the resurgent, militant Islam which makes no bones about its intention to destroy everything good and noble that Western Civilization once stood for. 

The Europe that once dominated world affairs is dead.  Every single European country has a birthrate that has fallen below replacement level.  With nothing to believe in and little to live for, Europeans have become too dispirited to even reproduce.

Islam stands waiting to fill the void.

Hope you guys like Sharia law.  Its day is coming.

I don't know if I should laugh or weep at that one...

The "silly thread" approach:
Now here I sit in my cozy democratic country, rather young, rather educated, rather tolerant, and rather well-doing like most of my fellows, not knowing that I actually s**t on what made my nation great. Oh, swell, back to monarchy, motherland, clericalism, and colonialism, I guess.

The "total downer" approach:
I think I'm not even commenting that. You are insulting a couple of tens of millions in just one post...

[Rev. Powell]

I admire the British, not for their monarchy - although I do think the monarchy is a valuable system of tradition and national unity - but for what they did for the world.  With the exception of the Islamic nations, whose religious traditions are largely incompatible with Western democratic tradition, wherever the British flag once flew, democracy has flourished.  The British were the first in Europe to get the hang of representative self-government, and they planted those seeds wherever they planted their flag.  For that, and for their courage and sangfroid in the face of danger, the Britons have always been heroes of mine.

I think Churchill would weep to see what is happening to his beloved island.

Me too.  But the Britons I admire most are those thinkers whose ideas were too radical to be adopted in a country which treasured the tradition of monarchy: thoise thinkers in the tradition of John Milton, John Locke and John Stuart Mill.  Tradition held the British back; because America had no monarchial tradition, we were able to adopt those forward thinking liberal ideas and turn them into our conservative ideas.

And I don't think we Americans have much standing to preach to Europeans about how they should handle their particular problems.  And I'm just not convinced that Europe is irrelevant as a world power, or that the complex challenges they now face are wholly a result of abandoning traditional Western values.