John Robson: Let Us Be Grateful, Not Just on Thanksgiving but Every Day

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. And if you’re tempted to say I missed it, I won’t quibble that I’m writing this piece on Canadian Thanksgiving. Instead, I’ll say keep it coming.
You might also object that Thanksgiving tends to include roast turkey and pumpkin pie, and you don’t much care for the former and can barely swallow the latter. But if so, after recommending the initially disgusting but ultimately rewarding spatchcocking of the turkey, I reply that you should be very grateful to live somewhere you can afford to say “not for me thanks” to one particular feast because there’s so much else to eat.
Another potential objection to which I’m very alert is that anyone who spent 15 minutes looking at the news this morning may feel drawn to resentment, not gratitude. Because The Epoch Times tries to be positive to a fault, I won’t mention any specifics such as the Mideast situation, the rising tide of nihilistic radicalism in Western societies, or the appalling quality of our politicians, including the mealy-mouthed woke “Wishing all Ontarians who celebrate #Thanksgiving a bountiful and festive holiday” one sent.
These are my principles, and if you don’t like them … But I don’t have to get specific, do I? It’s so bleak we might be tempted to envy the Romans watching the Republic crumble in the hands of demagogues whose lurid prose, daft policies, and unaffordable handouts seduced huge segments of the populace. But I say again, be thankful.
Be thankful for living in a society where a free press can tell you what’s going on, you can call politicians rogues and fools without them calling you prisoners or corpses, and you can know history. Be thankful that others share your concerns and want to do something about them.
As always, be wary also. Our political problems were not imposed from above or outside. In a self-governing society, the leaders are a portrait of Dorian Voter so we’re not looking good. But we’re also not in a gulag.
Years ago, a program on the quaint 20th-century technology called television interviewed people who’d hit bottom, including a former Vietnam POW and one who’d been homeless, and I vividly remember the former saying every day was a good day when there was a handle on the inside of the door, and the latter that it was when you didn’t eat from a dumpster. Yes indeed.
Those considerations, of course, say we should be thankful, not complacent or smug. Someone today is unjustly imprisoned, including in those dreadful Hamas tunnels, and someone is eating from a dumpster right now. But let us be grateful that in the face of such oppression and misery we are alive, have free will, and live in open societies whose cornucopia produces such blessed prosperity and strength that we can do something effective for the less fortunate.
It is also a responsibility. Some among us are constrained by ill health, grave misfortune, or other problems. But for the rest of us, the ready availability of excuses is a curse, not a blessing. We must share our good fortune. But we should be very thankful that we can, and indeed for the presence of such pressing tasks in a world that many claim, wrongly, is bleak primarily because it is so radically meaningless that even fun is not fun.
Let me conclude here, as so often, with a grateful turn to the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote, “The test of all happiness is gratitude,” adding that in early life, “I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom.” Later he figured it out.
One does not attain happiness by lunging for it directly, the classic hedonist error from which the triumphant serving of pumpkin pie for dessert helps shield some of us. But it is available if we do the right thing. And part of it is to count our blessings every day, having recognized them clearly as such. Even the blessing of having so much painful or aggravating stuff against which to pit ourselves in this vale of tears.
So I say Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, on the day and every day.