The Uses of Gratitude
A Thanksgiving prayer for a divided country.
SOME YEARS IT’S EASIER than others to feel and express gratitude when Thanksgiving rolls around. Due to my “day job” fighting international autocracy, I’m pretty plugged into how dark life can get in other parts of the world—in Russia, for example, things are pretty awful, notwithstanding whatever Tucker Carlson might tell you—which helps me put the American scene in perspective. I can usually tell my fellow Americans to enjoy the state of things and be grateful for the miracle that is contemporary American life.
This year that’s more difficult. Half the nation, including presumably many readers of this publication, feels terribly weighed down by the political situation following this month’s election. And I’m actually less inclined to whistle past this particular graveyard. It’s entirely rational, and even prudent, to brace for “the worst.”
And yet. And yet.
There remain even in this bleakness things to stay positive about, even if chiefly for strategic reasons. For starters, “the worst” is not going to be any less bad if you decide to assume that all those who voted for Donald Trump are themselves fascists and you would be better off without them in your life. Indeed “the worst” is going to be much more terrible if your ability to empathize and look beyond disagreements—no matter how disagreeable—leaves you with fewer friends and family and more locked into your own echo chamber instead of able to help bring them out of the echo chamber they’re locked in.
If Thanksgiving means anything, it is an opportunity to reflect on what’s most important in our lives. Sure—you’re angry. You feel betrayed. The rug has been pulled out from under you. Things feel chaotic. Dangerous, even.
Well—what better time than this to be grateful?
I’m serious! If we know how to be grateful only for the things that make us happy then we don’t actually know how to be grateful. Or maybe we only know the easy half. But the more important half of gratitude involves looking hard for the silver lining and learning to be grateful even for the stuff that seems to be going entirely wrong.
It’s like smiling when you’re unhappy to bring about a better mood. It’s not intuitive but it works. You can start by just feeling grateful for the things that are good and then work toward the things that aren’t. You’ll be surprised to find that you’re actually grateful for them as well.
We’re all in this together. They aren’t going anywhere and the vast majority of them are not fascists. And when the excrement starts to make contact with the air-redistribution apparatus, we should resist the temptation to say “I told you so” so that we can instead say something more constructive: “I’m here—speaking truth to power and doing what I can to resist our decline into ‘the worst’—and you’re always welcome to join me and I won’t hold it against you that we disagreed on this before, and I’m glad that we’re still on good terms so that we can now strive to make things better.”
But you’ll not be able to do that if in the interim you cut them off. The only way forward is together.
That’s what Thanksgiving is all about. And I’m grateful, especially this year, that the holiday is so fortuitously positioned on the calendar to give all of us a couple of weeks to rage and be indignant and then to take a breath and recognize what’s really important.
Happy Thanksgiving.
 | A guest post by
|