Happy Thanksgiving Today is the day we in the United States traditionally pause to take stock of our blessings, to remember and give thanks. The first Americans to celebrate Thanksgiving were primarily thankful for their survival. They were pioneers in a new world and were daily faced with the harsh realities of life without any of the comforts of civilization. Today, most of us are fairly confident or our survival from day to day. Our material “blessings” are orders of magnitude more abundant, in both quality and quantity, than those of the original Thanksgiving participants. Survival is no longer a big concern for most of us -- we are, thankfully, fairly confident that there will be a meal on the table tomorrow, and the next day. There’s one blessing, though, that hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. And that is the blessing of community. All the other people in our lives. Life would be pretty meaningless without them. We could have all the material luxuries in the world, and most of them would be worthless without anyone to enjoy them with. Beyond that, it is the other members of our community (and with the Internet, our definition of community is changing dramatically) that give life its variety and character. We all depend on each other for creating the stuff of life. Think of all the people whose efforts go into everything you have, everything that entertains you, everything that sustains you physically, everything that comforts you, all the art that appeals to your sense of beauty. Our strong community structure allows us each to specialize. Some of us work at putting food on the table, others work at putting roofs over our heads, others work to create beautiful art, others create words and pictures that make us think and grow, and still others build and maintain the machinery that moves our bodies, our things, and our ideas from place to place. If each of us had to worry about growing and processing and cooking our food, and building our own...
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 13:00:16 +0000
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