The Saudi National Day falls on Sep 23. It has been 88 yrs since King Abdulaziz created the Kingdom by uniting its multiple emirates. Had he not been able to do so, imperial Britain would have created another small, uber-oil-rich emirate on the shores of the Arabian Gulf.

The rest of the Arabia which would have encompassed 95% of today’s Saudi population would be living today in five/six dirt-poor states like Yemen. Instead over the last century, Saudi has provided its people a life of security and growing prosperity.....

..with free education for all including foreign scholarships for hundreds of thousands, free medical care and good basic infrastructure and public services and a globally respected passport that allows them wide freedom of travel.

The Kingdom has also gone through multiple bloodless transitions of power and has weathered decades of regional wars, coups, and terrorism while ensuring that its citizens had only minimal exposure to all this turmoil.

Benchmarked against large Arab states and particularly oil states (KSA's peers), Saudi has for century delivered the best value to its people by far. Venezuela also serves as an example of the disastrous management of oil wealth that even a developed western oil state fell into.

Yes, Saudi does not provide its people “democracy”+ political freedoms. It operates under an absolute monarchy that brooks no dissent and has suffered its share of corruption. Yet given decades of regional turmoil, the benefits of such a strong hand on the tiller are undeniable.

Thoughtful Saudis who look around at Arab “democracies” such as Lebanon and oil-rich Iraq in particular, let alone the disastrously mismanaged oil states of Iran and Libya, among others, realize that they have so much to be grateful for and to preserve.