A Blogger’s Thanksgiving Message
Here is a message I am going to share with my family at our Thanksgiving table. They will all moan and groan, and call it sappy, but it I believe it; so, here it is:
On this Thanksgiving, of course, our first task is to give thanks. We don’t know what will happen in the next hour or the next day, but right here, right now we are together as a family. Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, nieces and nephews, cousins and friends. We are linked by blood and happenstance. This table before us, laden with food, is symbolic of what we have achieved as individuals, but also what our own fathers and mothers, their fathers and mothers achieved.
But why us? Why should each of us be among the most privileged people who ever walked the Earth. Yes, we have worked hard as had our forbearers. But why us? Why are we so privileged when so many others on this Earth have nothing. No food, no ability to reflect, except perhaps upon their own misery.
Is it enough to simply give Thanks, or must we also ask what our obligations are, not just to those of us at our table, but to others everywhere.
What might we do now? Collect $5 to provide a mosquito net or $600 to educate a child in some poverty stricken land. Sharing our wealth is a start. But is it enough? What about sharing our collectively intelligence. We are blessed today to be able to communicate with people around the world. To collectively build the coding so that mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, cousin and friends everywhere can share too in the riches of which we are about to partake.
Whatever greater forces, earthly or heavenly, have brought us to this table to celebrate our privileges and accomplishments, now has given us individual and collective powers to make the world a better place and for that too we must give thanks.
