Did you miss President Obama’s annual Thanksgiving address? If so, it’s just as well. As several sites have mentioned, he pretty much ignored the whole point of the holiday. Oh, he said we should be thankful, but he never quite got around to using the “G” word. So exactly who is it that we’re supposed to thank?
Our current president seems to believe that our Thanksgiving traditions are rooted in a “sense of mutual responsibility” and “a celebration of community.” His message was peppered with the usual empty platitudes:
…we’re all in this together…
…All it takes is for each of us to do our part. ..And I’m thankful for the chance to do my part, as together, we make tomorrow better than today.
Blah, blah, blah…
Obama likes to encourage the misguided perception that he’s “Lincolnesque.” On the contrary, he is emblematic of the ungrateful attitude that President Lincoln was addressing in his March 1863 proclamation, appointing a national day of prayer and fasting:
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Amen.
Timeless, invaluable advice. As relevant today as it ever was 148 years ago.
