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November 23, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving
The Editorial Department, staff, etc. at Citizen Journal will be hosting its first Thanksgiving today. As I am also (as part of my semi-real job) in a run-up to a December 4th trial in a town I've never heard of 40 miles from a city I never wanted to go to, there's been something of a lapse in posting here of late.
In the meantime, here's a great piece in which George Will reminds us why we have the day off, and why this uniquely American holiday matters:
This year, when one of the Transportation Security Administration's 43,000 airport security screeners (perhaps two times more numerous than were Native Americans in 1620 in what is now eastern Massachusetts) confiscated a traveler's too-large tube of toothpaste, the traveler perhaps thought: Life is hard. So it is timely for Hodgson to remind us of the admiration that is due "as a tiny band of men and women, determined to follow what they believe to be the ordinances of their God, entrust themselves to the wild freezing ocean; confront disease, starvation, ferocious enemies and justified fear.''
Thanksgiving, Hodgson notes, is an echo of the breaking of bread at the heart of Christian worship, and of a Jewish Seder. It also is a continuation, in today's abundance, of harvest festivals around the world, which began millennia ago, when abundance was so rare as to seem miraculous. [Godfrey] Hodgson thinks Thanksgiving expresses "the deepest of all American national feelings'' -- gratitude. It is the inclusive gratitude "of a nation of immigrants who have lived for the most part in peace and plenty under the rule of law as established with the consent of the governed.''
From all of us here at CJ -- by which I mean, of course, me -- Happy Thanksgiving. No go watch that godawful parade. For the children.
Posted by bill at November 23, 2006 09:25 AM
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