Lots to be thankful in modern era
It makes sense to evaluate our current situation with respect not only to an ideal future but also to the actual past
Airlines sold 25 million tickets in the US this week. Moving throngs through hundreds of airports, seating them on thousands of complex machines, and transporting them to their various destinations safely and punctually is a colossal logistical challenge for thousands of pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance workers, flight attendants, reservation agents and — yes — airport security. Many of the aforementioned people sacrifice holiday time with their families to do these jobs.
Yet the inevitable delays and lost luggage will no doubt be grist for Thanksgiving-table gripes by some who fail to appreciate that, as recently as the early years of the current president’s lifetime, jet air travel was still the stuff of futuristic speculation. Don’t be one of them. In fact, when your turn comes to say what you’re thankful for, consider your many options from among the amenities, advantages, opportunities and protections we have — but which, within living memory, were unavailable, even unimaginable, for the wealthy and powerful.
In 1965, the unmanned Nasa vehicle Mariner 4 flew by Mars and took a few grainy shots of its surface from space. In 1976, Nasa’s Viking probes landed on the Red Planet, and transmitted thousands of high-resolution images of the landscape. Even then, it took effort for the public to get a look at the images, when they became available in newspapers, magazines or on television.
Nowadays, of course, they are available instantaneously, on demand and, essentially, for free via the internet — along with photographs of nebulas and stars from even deeper in space. Eighty-four per cent of US households own smartphones, each of which has approximately 100,000 times the processing power of Nasa’s most sophisticated mid-20th century computers.
Living like kings of the past
It’s possible to take this historical-adjustment business too far. The mere fact that regular people today live better than kings in the past is no excuse for complacency about inequality or misery that still exists. To the contrary, awareness that so many blessings are so abundant can and should motivate efforts to make sure they are equitably shared.
Still, it makes sense to evaluate our current situation with respect not only to an ideal future but also to the actual past. A sense of gratitude is closely related to a sense of perspective. And a sense of perspective is what President Abraham Lincoln meant to encourage when he set the precedent for our modern celebration by proclaiming the final Thursday of November 1863 as a national day of Thanksgiving.
Beset by Civil War, Americans had every reason not to count their blessings that year. Yet Lincoln called on the people to consider “bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come”. Anyone can marvel at the legacy left us by past generations. Everyone should.