THIS IS THANKFUL MONTH

 

This Is the Thankful Month

by Mark Franke

reprinted with permission of Indiana Policy Review

Thanksgiving Day seems late this year and by the calendar it is. Contrast that with my general sense of time’s moving much too fast, especially as I am looking at leaves still on the trees and thinking in terms of mid-October. If I am not confused enough, I have four and one-half inches of snow in my back yard as I write this. 

One of the history lessons I most enjoyed in my grammar school days was that of the first Thanksgiving in America. I suspect the story I learned is part fact, part apocrypha, but the moral it taught was the important thing. Even in difficult times, we should give thanks for our blessings and be willing to share those with our neighbors. The deconstructionists will disagree with me, but I saw only good things in the story of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag celebratory feast. 

If it weren’t for that story, apocryphal or not, we wouldn’t enjoy the best feast of the year. Who around here would even think of eating things like turkey, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie if it weren’t for this story? Given our German heritage in this part of the state, we would probably be stuck with pork and sauerkraut, not that there is anything wrong with that but it just doesn’t work on Thanksgiving Day.

We are not thankful enough in America today probably because we have become a consumerist society focused on what we possess and always coveting more. “He who dies with the most toys, wins” is a bumper sticker meme but has anyone ever seen a funeral hearse pulling a U-Haul trailer?

I am being cynical but I was given a tangible illustration of Americans demonstrating their thankfulness for all our blessings. In this case it was young Americans, the children at the Lutheran school my church operates.

It was this year’s annual Veterans’ Day commemoration. The school makes a big deal of this, inviting veterans from the congregation as well as the children’s family members who served. The children respond enthusiastically, painting posters and rehearsing skits to perform for the veterans in attendance. The focus is thankfulness for our America’s freedoms and how they are made possible by the sacrifice of the nation’s armed forces. 

Two examples of this should suffice.

The seventh and eighth grade boys basketball team sang the national anthem to begin the program. They asked their teacher if they could do it. Think about it; middle school boys volunteering to sing before an audience of adults.

The Pledge of Allegiance was led by the preschoolers, including the three-year-olds. Since our school begins each day with the Pledge, they have been practicing it all year and they performed like troopers, pun intended.

This could have been a purely academic exercise for these school children, an opportunity to disrupt the normal school day grind. It wasn’t; they clearly were into it, as we used to say. 

One might think that the concept of military service is purely abstract for children this age. They are fortunate in that they have not experienced the suffering side of war growing up in the United States. I am not aware of any who have lost a family member due to war, although one school father has been deployed multiple times with the Air National Guard.

Yet somehow I sensed that there was an intuitive appreciation within the students that these veterans had done something important, something that directly benefited them as young citizens. The whole idea of serving others is hardly alien to them, being part of their religious instruction. 

On the way home from the school, I stopped by an American Legion post. I was lucky to find an open parking spot. In addition to all the cars, there were about a half dozen nursing-home vans there. I was glad to see these facilities bring their veteran residents to the American Legion for a complimentary Veterans’ Day lunch, but I was confronted by the cold fact that these are mostly Vietnam era veterans. In other words, veterans of my generation.

I should think less about my generation and more about that of my grandchildren and those schoolchildren I was with that morning. They have learned to be thankful for blessings received. And they don’t need lectures from their grandfathers that start with “When I was your age . . .”.

We Americans have a lot for which to be thankful: the freedom to think as we choose, speak as we choose, worship as we choose, vote as we choose. Few of us will focus on these blessings at our Thanksgiving Day dinner, pondering instead the material bounty we enjoy. 

Even so, November is a month for thankfulness with these two holidays as its appropriate bookends. 

Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.