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THANKSGIVING
With Charity For All
In these difficult times, it is well to remember that Thanksgiving became a national holiday in perhaps the darkest moment of America’s history.

Though the observance of a harvest festival had been around since Pilgrim days, it was Abraham Lincoln who anointed Thanksgiving Day – the last Thursday in November – as an annual time to pause, reflect, and give thanks for our blessings, both national and personal.

The new holiday came in the fall of 1863, in the wake of the Battle of Gettysburg the previous July. On November 19, 1863 – just before that first national Thanksgiving Day – Lincoln delivered his inspiring Gettysburg Address, promising that a government “of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

At the time, this was a proposition in some doubt. With all of the challenges and difficulties swirling around our troubled world, it is easy to feel that these hallowed principles are also in doubt on this Thanksgiving Day.

But in the spirit of Lincoln’s optimism and belief in the future, let us today pause, reflect and give thanks, for there are blessings we need to cherish on this special day.

Begin with the astonishingly unlikely fact that one is alive at all. Each singular human being could only have been born as the person they are if things in centuries – indeed, eons – past had not unfolded exactly as they did. Someone might be alive if any particular egg had been fertilized by a different sperm over the history of the world, but that person would be someone else.

The odds of being born are too astronomical to calculate, so start your Thanksgiving with the reassuring knowledge that you won the most unlikely lottery possible to imagine. In comparison, winning Powerball is like a sure thing. You are, literally, a winner in life’s lottery.

Along with being one of nature’s winners, each of us has another great blessing – some time. It may be short or long, but we each have a bank account that is stocked with hours and days and months which we can squander or invest.

Mercifully, we can’t spend this precious time faster than second by second. There is no provision for early withdrawal from a time-IRA to be spent on a special trip. So there is always hope that we can use wisely the unspent time we still have.

To go from the sublime to the world of now, we have seen that the American people are capable of being roused against bigotry and hate and internal division, and also of rising to defend our nation and others against terrorism and war. When we follow our better selves, we seek to lead the world on the basis of values, values that are perfectly embodied in two other great speeches by Abraham Lincoln – his inaugural addresses.

In his first inaugural address, he was speaking to a bitterly divided America. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he said. “Though passions may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when, again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Four years later, after the deadliest war in our history, our country was torn apart in the most violent and hate-filled way. The Civil War had created a nation in which terrible damage and pain had been inflicted, fostering a lust for vengeance and resentment on every side.

In this bitter environment, Lincoln inspiringly declared that we should “bind up the nation’s wounds,” and we should do so “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

This Thanksgiving let us hope that leaders of nations throughout the world will heed Lincoln’s example and be courageous enough to emulate him. That would truly be a cause for Thanksgiving in the years to come.

— Alex S. Jones, Co-Executive Editor, DailyChatter