Video: Rod's Thanksgiving Message
Why gratitude is the source of all good things. Also, things Americans should be grateful for about their history, plus the geopolitics of the first Thanksgiving.
by Rod D. Martin
November 28, 2024
Up first, my five-minute Thanksgiving message: why thankfulness matters, and why covetousness (its opposite) is the root of all evils.
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Now second, more reasons for gratitude:
Three Reasons Americans Should Be Grateful for Their History
This Thanksgiving, like every other, lots of people are attacking America, its people, its history, and always its Founders. But that's foolishness. Here are three reasons why:
First, I don't see any of them leaving. They could, you know, and many of them promised yet again that if they lost the most recent election they would. If Cuba is so great, why not go there? Or why not go to Venezuela? Africa maybe?
We all know why.
Millions more come every year, from every country, to share in the same American Dream — that if we work hard and smart we can get ahead and give a better future to our children — that 330 million other people have before them, and that is still very hard, if not impossible, to achieve in most of the rest of the world.
There were not 330 million but just 3 million in 1776. Nearly all those people, and nearly all the 327 million since, either came from somewhere else or are the children of people who did. Most of them came with absolutely nothing. They wanted it, bad.
Second, some did indeed come as slaves. But the descendants of those slaves are free, in part because 365,000 free men died in battle to defeat the people who owned them (just 5% of Southerners, by the way: slavery had been outlawed in most of the North, which was most of the states, even before 1776). But they’re also free because courageous men and women like Martin Luther King, and Ralph Abernathy, and Rosa Parks, and Winthrop Rockefeller, and Andrew Young, stood up and spoke boldly at a time when it cost dearly to do so, and changed not just the laws but the hearts of the nation.
That's all the more remarkable when you remember that black people are just 12% of the population, and whites back then were over 80%. Such courage! Such eloquence! And they were ignored at first, then fought against, but then embraced, and canonized.
We should honor them and do likewise.
Third, King more than anyone was adamant: America was good, and its Founders were great, but sadly the nation hadn't lived up to its own vision. They had made almost everyone equal, in a world of kings and dukes and counts and serfs: at least a dozen rigid, legally enforced social classes that were abolished after millennia on the Founders’ principle that "all are created equal." And as I said above, most of the states extended that belief even to abolishing slavery, before or shortly after the American Revolution. Just not all. And there was no way to force the rest without a war no one wanted.
They almost got there. They abolished thousands of years of wrong. And they made it work! They laid the intellectual and moral foundation — absolutely new in the world — for the greater freedom yet to come, after which those hundreds of thousands of men died to make the potential kinetic. And when the same evil planter class that had enslaved its brothers and plunged the nation into war finally regained political power in the South, for most of another century brave men and women stood against them and used the system those Founders created to change the nation's heart.
King, and Abernathy, and especially Young, loved those men. I was not yet born when King was murdered, but I've heard Young talk about it in person. They loved the Founders. They knew the Founders weren't perfect, as they knew they were themselves not perfect, but they taught that they were great, because they were. They called us all to live up to the promise those Founders had made and almost kept, the promise of America's founding, that almost everyone had received, and that everyone around the world wants.
That promise didn't exist anywhere on Earth when it was made. Now the whole world at least pretends to keep it; but as millions of immigrants prove every year, it is still best kept here.
You and I will keep it, better still.
Americans have so much to be thankful for. Leftists focus on past sins, and in a country entirely composed of sinners there are plenty to be found. But that’s true of every country. What’s unique in America is that we’ve consistently overcome the wickedness, and the ignorance, and the lack of perspective that comes from covetousness. Much of the world is suffused with what my friend Jack Wheeler calls “the Evil Eye of Envy”. Americans uniquely cheer the victories of their fellow man. They’re grateful when others succeed.
This is why they’re the most inventive people on Earth. This is why they’re the wealthiest. And this is why they consistently cheer for the underdogs, whether it’s the beleaguered British in World War II or the courageous Civil Rights protesters two decades later, or entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
Americans uniquely celebrate a day of Thanksgiving because Americans uniquely are grateful. Losing that would plunge us into a long, Marxist night. Focusing on it will lift the world out of poverty and despair.
It already is.
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Finally, readers of The Rod Martin Report are a uniquely intellectual bunch, so here are a couple more essays for your lazy Thanksgiving afternoon reading.
