Member-only story
Learning Not to Be Thankful
I will do my yearly duty this week and be thankful while consuming too much food while sitting around in an over-warm dining room, swapping surface stories and easily paid-for thoughts and prayers. And I am as thankful as anyone, truly I am, for all the people and stuff I have been given. But this year, I can’t help but feel the weight of that last thing I said, “given”. It is after all the season of Thanks — “giving”. The thing is, that most of us living in Entitlement, forget that all that we have to be thankful for, has been given to us. Many of us believe we have been given these things by a God. Most of us come to believe we have been given these things by our own hard work, smarts, dreaming and planning, and “gumption”. Far fewer of us, would admit that much of what we have is ours through pure luck, the luck of the draw, the luck of where and when and to whom we were born, the luck of our skin-color or gender or school-grades. After all, how can one be thankful for something one does not really deserve any more than the next guy or gal? And it is the next guy and gal that make me queasy and eating not just pumpkin but humble pie. It is the next human being, one seat over, that makes me determined to be a bit more un-thankful this year.
In my particular country, we may still have our sense of tribe and team left, but many of us no longer have any sense of community. Oh, we think we do, but…
