Nothing about America is sacred to some people anymore. Even Thanksgiving is under attack.
A group called Truthsgiving recently hosted a night of “truth-telling, music, and laughter celebrating indigenous culture and history.” Not that this is new, of course—claims that Thanksgiving, “glorifies colonialism, slavery, and even epidemics” have been made before.
It’s tempting to simply dismiss such absurd charges. They solicit eyerolls and an annoyed feeling that anything can be cause for offense. Yet sometimes such movements are more insidious than we realize.
If you ask many people what Thanksgiving is about, they will provide an honest and accurate response: family and gratitude. And here we see why some radicals want to sully a unifying and wholesome holiday like Thanksgiving. Doing so taints a family occasion and promotes ingratitude, which helps undermine the American character.
So it’s easy to see why they’re targeting a holiday centered around the family. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote, “The future of humanity passes by way of the family.” Through the sacrament of marriage, men and women learn from one another, and the character of children is formed within the family. These are the bonds that root the individual and offer purpose.
Families are built around the small moments and the deliberate protection of those moments: of making time to read to children at bedtime and having a standing tradition of sharing a meal together amid the busyness of everyday life. Thanksgiving is naturally a precious occasion and is often a connecting point enveloping multiple generations.
The attack on gratitude is just as serious. Like forgiveness, gratitude is a choice, not grounded in naiveite or ignorance. Both forgiveness and gratitude require a confronting of wrongdoing, followed by a decision to dwell in the good rather than the bad.
Sometimes, like forgiveness, gratitude is difficult. Sadness and negativity have a way of lingering like unwanted guests. Those who, through habituation and resolve, have inculcated gratitude in their character, even amid the most devastating of life’s circumstances, arrest our attention the way virtue and fortitude tend to do.
Fostering gratitude is beneficial for the individual as well as for the nation. This republic we now seek to repair and maintain has always depended on a virtuous citizenry. That requires strength—and a gracious people is a strong people.
What is the intention of those who would deprive the American people of the spirit of thanksgiving, by sowing discord and inserting partisan politics into every aspect of the American way of life, by claiming that reflections on the American heritage should inspire nothing but shame and resentment? Are we to expect such assaults on the dignity of the individual to have no effect on the dignity of the nation?
While habituating gratitude on the individual level is an act of will and practice, doing so as Americans is aided through the study of history. We see in primary documents evidence that the founding generation strove to establish a wonderful continuity of gratitude and obligation that would form a single people. In the 1774 Suffolk Resolves, they declared,
That it is an indispensable Duty which we owe to GOD, our Country, Ourselves and Posterity, by all lawful Ways and Means in our Power, to maintain, defend and preserve those civil and religious Rights and Liberties for which many of our Fathers fought—bled—and died; and to hand them down entire to future Generations.
The debt of honor began with the men and women of the Revolution who, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, laid “so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” And it extends forward to posterity, as an invitation to join in the great project of preserving the experiment in self-government.
The most appropriate response to such a debt is not a material offering, as it itself is not a material gift. It is a gift of character, and we respond with the dedication of our very person.
Like others, Lincoln knew that the memories of the deeds of the Revolution would fade as new Americans were born and journeyed to become possessed by the land. Along with that fading could come the fraying of Americans’ binding gratitude. Fortunately, common history is not all that ties us together. For,
when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
What a wonderful thought to linger on this Thanksgiving.
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