What We’re Thankful For

National Review Online

Thursday, November 28, 2024

 

As Americans, we have much for which to be thankful.

 

As was traditional at harvest time, we can begin with our many material blessings. We remain the world’s richest nation, with a standard of living approached by no nation of even remotely comparable size. Many of Europe’s most distinguished states have a median income on par with the poorest states in our union.

 

The greatness of the United States and its way of life has many causes, but it would be churlish to deny the role that our land itself has played in that success. The Mississippi River basin, draining into the Father of Waters, contains more miles of navigable river than the entire rest of the world put together. We have many large natural harbors, around which have grown up great cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The history of Africa alone shows what difference can be made by the absence of these two blessings. Unlike the nations of Europe and Asia, we enjoy the protection of two vast oceans, separating us from all but two neighbors by sea. As recently as 1917, we scarcely had or needed an army worthy of the name.

 

We are blessed by huge stretches of fertile farmland, sturdy forest, gorgeous beaches, and teeming fisheries. We were the first nation to strike oil beneath our own soil. From the gold rush to the natural-gas boom, the land itself has showered us with plenty. Our great diversity of climes and communities means that every American restless of home can find some place more congenial within our borders. There remains much room to grow. With nearly 340 million people, we still have a lower population density than the Faroe Islands.

 

And yet, many other big nations have natural resources and large, desirable territories. That alone has not made America.

 

We are thankful for our patrimony. Western civilization came down to us from its beginnings in ancient Greece and Rome, stretching back two and a half millennia. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition traces back even further. The political traditions of England planted the seeds of American exceptionalism in Jamestown and Plymouth from the outset: representative assemblies, consent to a constitutional charter, and the liberty of dissenting religious communities. Colonies founded by charters to private companies and peopled by restless dreamers gave us an entrepreneurial spirit from the outset. May we never lose it.

 

We are thankful, yet again after a national election, for the genius of our political system. We are thankful that over 150 million Americans were able to exercise their self-government and their God-given right to change their rulers with an election few doubt was free and fair. We are thankful that an assassin’s bullet did not derail that process, however close it came in a field in Butler, Pa.

 

We have the world’s oldest continuous written constitution and the oldest system for the peaceful transition of power. These things have proven enduring against internal dissension and civil war, disputed elections, riots, assassinations, leaders of dubious character and competence, and huge cultural changes and conflicts. We approach the nation’s 250th birthday in two years having survived and surmounted wars, depressions, slavery, plagues, and great-power nuclear showdowns. We traveled in less than two centuries from the Old North Bridge to the moon.

 

It has been our gratitude, not our grievances, that has allowed us not only to do great things as a nation, but to do them as a continuous nation, still following a common rulebook and still represented in a continuous national legislature. The hardship of the Pilgrims still reminds us of how we got here. The doughboys invoked a debt to Lafayette when he was nearly a century in his grave. We still revere the Declaration of Independence, argue over the Constitution, and recite the Gettysburg Address because our society has long understood that the harvest of our liberties and our prosperity are all the more bountiful from uninterrupted cultivation.

 

To say what we are thankful for is to acknowledge to whom we should be thankful. That starts with the Almighty, author of all blessings. It includes those who came before us, from the great leaders and founders who appeared at providential moments to the many who struggled and sacrificed. We are thankful to all those who serve and those who protect, especially those on duty today. We are thankful to all those past and present who instruct the next generation in the American tradition and the American way. And we are thankful to family and friends without whom blessings would be cold comforts to be taken alone.

 

This is a day to rest from our labors, the better to enjoy the spirit of gratitude. But it should also inspire us to this commitment: to pass on what we have inherited, preserved and enriched, so that our posterity someday has reason to give thanks for us.