Lost meaning of day

Monday morning after Thanksgiving break, the students at my college staggered into class, many of them with long faces. I asked how their Thanksgiving was and one girl offered the opinion that hers was “terrible.” When I asked why, she replied that it was because of family; half of the class nodded in agreement.

My initial response was to tell them that I well understood, that families can be difficult, and that I was thankful that mine lived a thousand miles away. Then I told them that as a society we seemed to have developed the wrong idea about Thanksgiving.

It isn’t a holiday to celebrate family and friends, or to prepare ourselves for buying things we don’t have money for and don’t really need anyway on Black Friday. Rather, I told them, Thanksgiving is a national holiday. That means that what we celebrate isn’t having to break bread with people we don’t necessarily like, but rather the fact that we are lucky enough to live in this country as opposed to all the failed and failing states in this world—Syria, let’s say. We celebrate the fact that we are born into what Lincoln once called “mankind’s last, best hope.”

So, by that standard, the gauge of success for Thanksgiving isn’t who had to munch on the drumstick, or what Black Friday sales were compared to last year, but whether the Stars and Stripes still flew over our campus. What we celebrate, in short, to borrow from one of our national anthems, is “O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.” Maybe as a society, I told them, if we got back to that vision, we would all be in a better place. STEWART DIPPEL

Clarskville