Thanksgiving

bySpace Cowboy

34 followers

13 years ago

My post today is not about marketing.  Instead it’s about something very important to me.  Thanks for your indulgence.

It was good that first, Honest Abe and later, FDR determined that America needed an official day of Thanksgiving each year.  A time when Americans could pause from their everyday grind and remember how much we as a nation, as families, and as individuals have to be grateful for.   Lincoln proclaimed the first, national Thanksgiving Day while the country was still embroiled in our terrible Civil War.  And, interestingly, Roosevelt signed legislation making Thanksgiving a permanent National holiday just a few days before the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor in 1941.

This year’s celebration found us still embroiled in hostilities around the world.  It found our servicemen and women and their families once again separated from each other by thousands of miles of earth and sea, while we here at home enjoyed the bounty and freedoms that are the direct results of  their – and so many of their predecessors’ – sacrifices for us.  Because of those sacrifices, there will be now and  forever more, empty chairs at thousands of Thanksgiving tables in thousands American families homes… chairs that should be filled, but instead are empty… their intended users the very real and tragic actual cost of our Thanksgiving feasts.

I long ago ceased thanking God for America’s victories in battle.  Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,”  McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” Bradley’s “Flyboys,” Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” and the horror of 9/11, which we all witnessed in real time, disabused me of any notion I may have had that a loving God would take any part in the slaughter of any of His children of any nationality or any religion for any reason whatsoever.  My belief is, my hope is, that instead of supporting any side, He averts His tearful eyes as His children destroy themselves over land, oil, religious or ethnic bigotry, national pride, or any of the myriad other reasons that have been used over thousands of years as excuses for killing other human beings.  Surely… SURELY, He has to be above all that.  Doesn’t He?

Still, wars have always been a staple of human existence and survival.  And sadly, I see no evidence of them ceasing to be so anytime soon.  So instead of God, I thank those men and women who purchased this and every single one of my 56 Thanksgiving Suppers with their innocence, their blood, their limbs and their lives.  I thank the parents who allowed them to go and who will always mourn the loss of their child.  I thank the wives and husbands who must now raise their children alone.  And I thank the children, who, though they had no voice in any of it, still pay the greatest part because their fathers or mothers are never coming home – and they don’t know why.

Since my childhood, Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving Day have always been closely associated in my mind.  They have always had a similar “feel” to me… a feeling of happiness and gratitude, but edged with sadness.  And an impression that I mustn’t forget, mustn’t take for granted that which I received freely, but which cost so many so very, very much.

So thank you.  Thank you fathers and uncles, grandfathers and great grandfathers.  Thank you not only my ancestors but those of all my fellow countrymen for your sacrifices, your courage and your priceless gift to me.  I won’t forget.