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There’s a wholesome wisdom in counting your blessings and being grateful for them… it protects you from the kind of envy and resentment that so easily eats out your very soul.
So many people on the left use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to vent their spleens on all the things they despise about the culture that made them what they are.
Colin Kaepernick — who was fortunate enough to be adopted into a stable family, fortunate enough to enjoy good health, fortunate enough to have a combination of athletic skills, coaches, teams, and networks of support to elevate him into a million-dollar career in professional football, which he managed to parley into a VERY lucrative gig as an ‘influencer’ — has nothing positive to say about living in a country in which all those things were possible.
One need look no further than the suffering people of Ukraine — freezing in the dark while missiles rain down on their cities — to realize that not everyone lives in a world where a path such as his is even possible.
But Kapernick, one year, made a show of spending his time and energy on one thanksgiving in some kind of angry political event on Alcatraz island:
‘I was on Alcatraz Island at the Indigenous People’s Sunrise Gathering, in solidarity with those celebrating their culture and paying respects to those that participated in the 19 month occupation of Alcatraz’. (Full story here: DOUCHE BAGGERY: Kaepernick Pops Up On Thanksgiving Spewing MORE Stupid Garbage)
That’s the problem with rage, entitlement, and envy. It warps your vision of life and blinds you to the many good things in life you already have. Because of his jaded attitude, even having the wealth and fame of a NFL quarterback wasn’t enough to satisfy him. There was always someone failing to give him the respect he thinks he deserves or slighting his fragile ego in some way.
The political left draws its strength from people with this kind of aggrieved thinking, always framing the world as they see it in terms of oppressed and oppressor, my group and their group, using the very fears and distrust they spend time whipping up as motivation to rally around their political causes for mutual defense.
It’s the reason the dishonest ‘1619 Project’ is so pernicious. Not only is it built on fictions that have been called out by historians across the political spectrum, but it is designed to drive wedges into social divisions. Divided people are easier to manipulate, after all… especially when they have a scapegoat to blame for their problems.
When you steep yourself in resentment, no amount of personal success can make you genuinely happy.
Exhibit A:
And now please enjoy this this heart-warming Thanksgiving message from MSNBC pic.twitter.com/sOJtLQZwto
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 24, 2022
That is the miracle of thanksgiving.
Even a family of the most modest means, gathered around the dinner table, enjoying one another’s company and thanking God for the things we do have has far greater wealth than some perpetually-aggrieved trust fund baby could ever comprehend.
It’s the lesson that Ebenezer Scrooge came to understand when the Spirits showed him Tiny Tim praying around the dinner table.
It’s the lesson the Apostle Paul understood when he penned Phillipians 4:12:
‘I know how to get along with little, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.’
It’s the motivation that led various leaders of yesteryear to call the nation to a time of national thanksgiving for the gracious hand God has led us with.
The exhortation given by Moses to Israel in Deuteronomy is no less true of us in our day:
Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, 14 then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, …Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. — Deuteronomy 8
It sometimes takes a wake-up call like a pandemic, famine, war, or economic collapse to remind us that we do not have the sort of control over our world we imagine ourselves to have.
Perhaps Thanksgiving is an opportunity not just for those of us grateful to God for the world we are so blessed to live in… but also for the angry and entitled people so steeped in their bitterness should take a moment to consider how people with so much ‘less’ going for them live far happier lives.
