A Prayer of Thanksgiving

For which I'm thankful:

I give thanks for my wonderful family, my bride Jeanne and son Chris at the very top of the list, good friends, including colleagues over many years in a number of locations, and the opportunity to work and make a living in journalism, which I love.

We give thanks for our nation, which has triumphed over so many daunting challenges, including the Great Depression, recessions, disease, two World Wars, the Civil War and evil as embodied in modern terrorism and Adolph Hilter and Nazism.

There are also the many, smaller things that we take for granted in our country. Natural beauty, entertainment, such as music and films, technology, college and professional sports, great restaurants and the ability to take a vacation and travel now and then.

We're very fortunate that the experiment, known as America, has given us all so much. Perfect? Of course, not.  But there's nowhere else on earth that works through its challenges so well, because of a system of laws and ideals ingeniously devised by the Founding Fathers and upheld by industrious people.

For these reasons and many more, we have reason to give a prayer of Thanksgiving each and every day our lives.

Things I Don't Get

1. Political rants on social networks.  It is akin to yelling in a conversation. Far from being about yielding understanding, it is about expressing anger, or frustration. And there's a lot of that.  Much of it doesn't appear to be even remotely aimed at engaging others to come over to one's own way of thinking. Or if it is, it falls well short of that aim.  It is similar to the problem with elected leaders.  Our democracy has been built on the need to forge useful solutions despite differences.  We'll improve as a society and a country when more of us place common purpose above self.

Remember the famed fable or myth of Narcissus, from which the psychological concept of Narcissism is derived? It is about a youth who falls in love with his own reflection, rejecting the advances of the female Echo.  His behavior leads to his demise. It correlates to the modern phenomenon of the political "echo chamber", in which too many people are casting their voices, unwilling to hear anything else.

Next, I'll lighten up for a few entries.

2. Pinterest.  Not a big deal in the scheme of things, but I tried to get ahead of the curve on .this increasing popular site, ranked 15th in the U.S. I've not found it useful or interesting, for me. Most of its users are women, so maybe that has something to do with my inability to "get it".

3. The NBA.  I'm not a basketball hater. In fact, I love college basketball. But they are two different games, pro and college hoops.  I went to a number of Washington Wizards games when Michael Jordan had his ill-fated involvement with the team, but that was the end of it for me.  And that was a decade ago.  These guys are great athletes, I know that. But that isn't enough for me to pay to watch. The cost of attending the NBA games has gotten ridiculously high in my view.  I would have rather gone to see the Washington Nationals, when they were a bad baseball team at a lower price, than support the NBA product.  And for me at least, it isn't much better on television, which doesn't cost an extra cent to watch at home.

4. People who "don't like" seafood, or some other entire class of food.  We're not talking about allergies or other serious health issues here. I've cooked all of my adult life.  And one little secret of cooking is that if you want to, you can sneak in all kinds of ingredients that people think they dislike but they will acknowledge actually improve taste.  It is clear to me that some folks have contrived their food preferences based on perception of the food.  In this case, in their minds, perception becomes realty. Not talking about vegetarians here either.  Most of them are honest and straightforward about why they are doing what they do. (I don't routinely sneak potentially unpopular ingredients into recipes, in case it comes up as an issue down the road). 

Back to my original point, which is a broader observation on the political part of all of this. As humans, despite a self-assured notion of our highest level of intelligence among earthy creatures,  we have seen limits to empathy.  A quick check of one definition of that word, according to Merriam-Webster: "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this".

Here's hoping that, on the things that actually do matter, (not the NBA, Pinterest or food preferences), we gain a greater ability to empathize with our fellow inhabitants of planet Earth.

With the new film about Abraham Lincoln gaining a lot of attention, I'm reminded of one of his most popular quotations. He was an aspiring Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate when he said "a house divided against itself cannot stand".  It was 1858, before the outbreak of the Civil War.  As a deeply religious man himself, Lincoln drew upon a passage from the Bible, Mark 3:25, which says "if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand."