This land is your land
Finding something every American can give thanks for
Sara Josepha Hale, an influential editor in mid-nineteenthcentury America, dedicated a decade and a half of editorials, published in the women’s magazines she ran, to push for a federal holiday in November to give thanks for the good things Americans share. The holiday, she argued in the mid-1850s, would represent the “moral and social reunion of Americans.”
Less than a decade later the nation descended into civil war. During that bloody war that ripped the nation apart, President Abraham Lincoln finally heeded Hale’s pleas: In 1863 he instituted an annual day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November.
In doing so, President Lincoln noted the horrors of the Civil War, the “widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.” He implored the “Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it soon...to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
(In the 1940s, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt settled on the fourth Thursday in November, allowing for more shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.)
Today, Americans are again, rightly, concerned about the integrity of the Union. Rage, intolerance and hate often fuel the internet, along with the impulse to purge all people with opposing views. Still, most Americans want to feel the sense of “reunion” that Sara Josepha Hale described a century and a half ago.
Perversely, Thanksgiving has also come to be seen as a symbol of division. It’s the time when families come together to shout, argue and fight over turkey and cranberry sauce, a time of falling out rather than coming together. There’s an entire genre of advice columns about how to most effectively confront relatives who are intent on turning a family meal into a searing political debate.
But Sara Josepha Hale and Abraham Lincoln thought it was important to American society to stir up one of the feelings that could unite a fractious nation, or dinner table: gratitude. Everyone has something, and most people many things, to be thankful for.
Counselors tell people who are recovering from drug addiction, struggling with mental illness, or coming out of prison to cultivate an “attitude of gratitude,” a frame of mind that focuses on what they have, and what they’ve accomplished, and not what they haven’t got. Out of humility and grace spring renewal.
An attitude of gratitude provides benefits to all, and Thanksgiving is certainly the time to cultivate it.
One thing that every American can be grateful for is the land that we call, “America.” It’s from the American landscape that we derive most of the food we eat. It’s from the land, or under the land, that we obtain so much of the energy we use. It’s from the land that we get so much enjoyment in everything from our resplendent National Parks to the suburban trails that attract thousands and thousands of hikers and joggers, children and elderly, artists and executives every day.
We give thanks for our land first and foremost by stewarding it for future generations, so they can enjoy it and its fruits as much as we do. That means extracting some resources, including fossil fuels, but with an eye toward the future and not just the present. That means performing that extraction in the safest and least destructive manner possible. That means growing as much food as we can to feed the people of today, without depleting the land such that it becomes useless to the people of tomorrow. That means setting aside some landscapes in perpetuity, to be enjoyed in their pristineness as long as they exist.
There’s still a lot to disagree about in the details of this stewardship — a lot of politics, a lot to chew on with your guests, along with the Thanksgiving turkey. But the starting point is something we all can and should share: gratitude for a land that makes life as we know it possible.
The digital landscape has proven more divisive than unifying; any real Thanksgiving “reunion,” as Sara Josepha Hale hoped for, will begin in the landscapes of the real world.