What can we be thankful for in 2020? Plenty.
The Inside Story
In this year like no other in modern history, it's easy to focus on the challenges and overlook the blessings.
As we head into the week of Thanksgiving, which presents its own special frustrations because of new health orders telling us to stay at home and avoid even relatively small gatherings to combat the cornavirus, we can still give thanks.
We can be thankful for the doctors and nurses, EMTS and other first-responders, and the researchers who are all working to keep us safe and make us well.
We give thanks for the grocery workers who keep shelves stocked even as we plunder the toilet paper aisle for no apparent reason. For the mail carriers, package delivery teams and others who bring things to us so that we can remain safely in our homes. And for so many others who work tirelessly to bring some sense of normalcy and comfort to us amid a most unsettling time.
We also can give thanks for the beauty and bounty of nature.
After six decades on this Earth, I remain in awe of the natural beauty of Ohio, especially at this time of year.
I have said it before in this column, and it is worth repeating, that a drive through the countryside in fall is gives a clear image of more of the many things for which we can be thankful: Fertile land, hardworking farmers and the abundant food produced on the 14 million acres of agricultural land between Ohio's many cities.
The patchwork of gray-brown soybean fields, golden cornstalk stubble and the still-green pastures stretch out for miles. Cows loaf near their barns, deer graze on the corn kernels dropped by pickers, an occasional hawk scans the naked fields for vermin, and we can count among our blessings that we live in a place as beautiful as this.
We also can give thanks for what those fields and farms represent – the land from which we receive our food for Thanksgiving, Christmas and every other day.
Turkey, chicken, beef, pork, milk, eggs, wheat for flour, fruit and vegetables produced here, combined with the food processing and packaging businesses around all of that farming, make up Ohio's largest industry.
So in this challenging year of 2020, it's worth taking a moment to thank a farmer, remember the true meaning of Thanksgiving and consider a little of the history of what has become a national holiday:
President George Washington issued a proclamation in 1789 declaring the first national day of thanksgiving, asking people for gratitude to God “for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country” and “the favorable interpositions of his Providence.”
In following years, states set their own dates for the day of thanksgiving until President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November for all to give thanks on the same day – “reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with
one heart and one voice by the whole American People.”
He issued that proclamation on Oct. 3, 1863 – a year in which America was more divided than ever, one in which tens of thousands of American troops died in Civil War battles.
“In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to invite and provoke the aggressions of foreign states, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union,” Lincoln's proclamation said.
Amid that time of unparalleled division, President Lincoln took time to remind people of the many reasons to be thankful, and he easily could have been talking about Ohio today:
“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.”
Alan D. Miller is editor of The Dispatch. amiller@dispatch.com @dispatcheditor