I Don't Need the Gov't to Tell Me to be Grateful

It was raining so much last Thursday that we bagged going out for sushi and stayed in and had steak instead. We took advantage of the four day weekend to do some fall cleaning and get ready for winter. The deck furniture is all in the shed now. We did NOT cook a turkey, and we did not take special time out to ponder our many blessings. We do this all the time anyway, and we do not need a government designated day to acknowledge and display gratitude for our good health and fortune.

I attended and sang at a church service on Wednesday evening where we were encouraged to be thankful for the almost obscene plenty that God has bestowed upon us and to share, especially through the church, with the less fortunate and with the missionaries and missions that the church supports. The preacher read Lincoln’s thanksgiving proclamation from 1863, which can be read here: http://members.aol.com/calebj/proclamation.html. It is a moving piece of oratory except for the political propaganda thrown in it, especially in the final sentence:

“And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

Here the widowmaker and orphanmaker in chief himself commends his victims to God’s care and characterizes his aggression against the seceding states as “unavoidable”. He deftly equates “Union” with such attributes as peace, harmony and tranquility. The conflict to which he alludes was avoidable, and the blessings of harmony, peace and tranquility might have been enjoyed just fine without the necessity of “Union”.

The preacher remarked that FDR had proposed to move Thanksgiving up a week in order to expand the Christmas shopping season, but the public outcry prevented his doing so. Nonetheless, the “Christmas season” has expanded so much commercially that you can see Christmas decorations in stores just after Labor Day. So FDR didn’t need to change the holiday after all. People have expanded Christmas all on their own without any help from government. And if government didn’t decree that the fourth Thursday in November is Thanksgiving Day, folks would probably still organize harvest and thanksgiving festivals and feasts and would arrange for days off from their jobs to attend to them.