God Bless the Queen!
We sit here writing while our Queen and Chairman, Jill, is simultaneously: baking pumpkin pie; sauteeing Shiitake mushrooms for her “turkey” stuffing, which isn’t actually baked in the turkey; chopping and combining herbs to place inside the turkey (to flavor it); tracing Lucy’s hand-print on paper to use as a stencil/cut-out “turkey” for the left-over pie crust; and forming that crust into various cinnamoned treats.
Observing that effort, and recalling all of yesterday’s effort–preparing the turkey so that it can sit in the fridge “airing-out” over overnight, making gravy from the giblets, boiling the cranberries for sauce–along with every other day’s effort all year long, makes us truly grateful and thankful that she is both our partner and wife. Thank you, Lord!
God Bless America!
We are also quite thankful to have be born and to have lived in this great nation.
The United States, and what it represents, still remain the pinnacle of civilization and human achievement and the best wishes and dreams of mankind. Much of that is due to the nation’s Founding Fathers and their intelligence and wisdom to design appropriate checks-and-balances on power, to consider the inherent Fallen Nature of Man in their plans for a nation, and their empiricism to have learned from the mistakes of pre-1776 history. (We only wonder, of course, why others–including some of our own current, government servants–have not learned that lesson? For more on that, please see last year’s Thanksgiving message.)
We often remark to our girls that they need to realize and appreciate both their historic and geographic good fortune. Of all of the people who have ever been born, say 10 billion or so, to be born now–with medicine, equal rights, toilet paper, nutrition, opportunity, technology, etc–compared to almost anyone in any past era and to be born here–with all those right and privileges that still do not exist throughout the world–is luck and blessing beyond mere good fortune.
Whether through time or through space, consider the truly minuscule odds of being born to such bounty and freedom. Thank you, Lord!
God Bless the Grown-ups!
With that freedom and bounty comes the adult responsibility to maintain and defend it. So, thank God for the soldiers, sailors, marines, and all the service men and women–past and present–who put themselves in harm’s ways for their family, friends, and hundreds-of-millions of perfect strangers.
But, we are thankful for more than just those who are willing to bear arms for our and the nation’s benefit and defense. As we wrote recently in, The Fallen Nature of Parents & Kids’ Sport:
The other remarkable thing worth mentioning is that throughout the country, there are tens of thousands of (generally) semi-gray and semi-wrinkled volunteers who are willing–usually as politely as possible–to soothe and/or reprimand those who behave childishly. Most don’t sign up for it but still do it when they learn its their responsibility. We project–in a strict psychological sense–and joke that they do it as penance: perhaps consciously, perhaps not.
Seriously, thank God for them and God bless them as they do their generally unnoticed and under-appreciated work of attempting to help parents grow up. We don’t think that it is an overstatement to say their efforts help keep society functioning, and they most certainly help keep it civil.
The more that we meet and interact with such folks–those who use their time, intelligence, wisdom and energy–do to the right for others at (1) no expectation of direct or indirect personal benefit and (2) often at substantial personal cost, the more grateful that we become (and the more it seems that the Holy Spirit is quite present on earth and in their hearts and minds).
It is that mature self-sufficiency and initiative and effort to take and/or enforce the decent and right and responsible and honorable action that makes the vast majority of the country’s various types of communities successfully function–both individually and aggregately, and it is beautiful. Thank you, Lord!
Happy Thanksgiving!
We pray that in the future our nation continues to exist in such a way that we can continue to be thankful for the accumulated benefits of the individual effort and love, and that it is not destroyed by senseless and poorly-considered government programs.
In our mind, an insufficient government leads to distrust and tribalism and a societal and national “pie” substantially smaller than the sum-of-its-parts, while too much government destroys personal initiative and much of what we cherish and mention above. Thereby, again, resulting in a whole less than the the sum-of-its part, and we are clearly not writing of merely financial issues.1
So, beyond our personal gratitude for family and friends and acquaintances and good fortune, per last year’s message we thank God for the pilgrims who learned from their early collectivist mistakes to show that a better world could exist; we thank God for this nation’s founders who learned from others’ mistakes and created this most, truly Christian of nations from which everyone benefits; and we thank God for everyone–past and present, stranger and acquaintance and friend–who has or had the unharnessed opportunity and the love and the energy to do (and show) what is right. That is why this experiment continues to work (and shows that at least socially, under the right conditions, a perpetual motion machine exists.)
Happy Thanksgiving!
Copyright © 2009 Spero Consulting.
Footnote:
- Too little government to establish the Rule of Law creates a tribe mentality where individuals only trust–and therefore are completely dependent upon–those who are local and just like them. There is little independence and initiative and freedom in a society where one must remain just like “the others” to both fit-in and survive. Too much government also mandates or induces complete dependence–but in a centralized, rather than local way. That concentration of government power also destroys the independence, initiative and freedom of individuals. Like Goldilocks, we citizens of the United States seems to have found a sustained and reasonable balance, which many want to maintain. At issue is the robustness of that balance to stupidity and meddling and the desire for control. In other words, how easy will it be to slip and never recover from a fall from the pinnacle because of missteps? In some ways, the financial markets seems to be much less robust than many recently considered. What of society and the nation? We have written frequently on these topics. ↩
