27 Nov Thanksgiving and Gratitude for America
Americans celebrate Thanksgiving by taking a break from our everyday lives, filled with zany level busyness, mundane routine, stress, strains, and worries, to ponder more deeply that God is great, and that all good comes from God, that He is the source of life, the true provider of our needs. We are reminded to pray, and thank God and to trust Him. Genuine gratitude to God for His presence and care is humbling, purifying, and inspiring. Breaking bread with loved ones is the outward manifestation of this inner gratitude. It’s no wonder Thanksgiving is a most cherished holiday.
The modern-day celebration of a Thanksgiving meal replicates our forebears’ first Thanksgiving in 1621 in Plymouth Colony when the English Pilgrims celebrated with the Wampanoag people. For centuries American children, at home and in school, replayed that first formal day of giving thanks to God.
About 150 years later, the consecrated reverence for God that the Pilgrims celebrated was echoed and repeated in the founding of America, in the Declaration of Independence. The Founders openly honored as founding tenet of America, that we all have God-given rights to life, and to liberty, and to pursue our individual dreams leading to happiness. America was structured around honoring God-endowed liberty. The Founders knew and said that flowing from liberty is the right to own private property which is deeply intertwined with protecting liberty.
Did those founders writing in 1776 know their country’s history narrated in William Bradford’s journal, Of Plymouth Plantation? Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation recounted the journey of the Pilgrims departure from Europe to their establishment of Plymouth in modern day Massachusetts.
One of the most poignant and timeless messages recorded in Bradford’s journal can be summarized in modern vernacular “socialism always fails.” Communal ownership inevitably fosters misery, lack, laziness, and division. Because the Pilgrims committed to communal ownership of land before they left Europe, their first efforts at farming in the new world failed because, as Bradford recounts, everyone was expected to work hard yet only be rewarded by receiving what they needed. There was no connection between hard work and reward.
Bradford reported “the young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense,” and “.. the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could.” “Community of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent.”
Bradford solved the problem by setting up private property rights, assigning to each family a parcel of land which they could cultivate to feed their own families. Abundance and supply naturally resulted. So in our earliest days, our country proved the undeniable truth that socialism always fails. Turns out we do need that connection between hard work and reward. As my dad used to love to say, “T’was ever thus.”
Proving that the alleged wise among us are sometimes the most ignorant, some supposed institutions of higher learning today foster a determined dismissal and disdain for the profound Thanksgiving truths of the rightness of gratitude to God. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students were invited to the “4th annual Thanksgiving Myth-busting” designed to continue an “exploration of the narratives justifying land grabs via colonialism,” and to celebrate a National Indigenous Day of Mourning (NDOM). UC Davis hosted a Zoom event called “Decolonizing Thanksgiving in the Classroom. Whether student or university led, these events not only cloud but actually sully the meaning and importance of Thanksgiving.
Gratitude to God on Thanksgiving should include gratitude for America. Our history is filled with profound truths and courageous people. Brave Pilgrims leaving Europe and risking everything in pursuit of religious freedom, a Plymouth Colony that early learned that socialism always fails, revolutionaries who declared independence from the world’s then single superpower, and founders who used the occasion of their newfound independence to form a country built around permanent protection of the individual’s God-give right to liberty, life, pursuit of their dreams. They embedded in our founding, laws, and culture, a reverence for the individual’s right to live in liberty, a right denied still today to millions across the globe, living under the repression of socialism, communism, Islamism and many other variants of tyranny.
Noble thinkers recognize the timeless significance of the First Thanksgiving in American history. It embedded gratitude to God in our nation’s ethos. The simplicity of pure gratitude to God is the timeless reason for our Thanksgiving holiday.
We are blessed to live in America.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Debbie Georgatos