We are preparing for Thanksgiving, assembling gifts for the holidays, maybe beginning to decorate the house. Prices are high, to be sure, but there is a sense — a welcome feeling, a relief, really — that things are normal. We are talking about football and girding for the onset of colder weather. Sweaters are coming out of the drawer. The country is breathing easier, if not exactly breathing easy. It's almost as if we are living in the first few lines from a music video featuring Carrie Underwood and Michael W. Smith: "All is well."
It may be. But the surface calm is masking an inescapable truth: We are coming through two of the most tumultuous peacetime years in our history.
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