I was told the other day that saying, “Happy Thanksgiving” was offensive. Apparently, the woke intersectionality people who are trying to label as many things as possible as offensive have deemed that saying ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ is offensive. They claim that wishing someone ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ is white supremacist; it supports genocide; we all know the script by now. The media tells us to “never forget the racist origins of Thanksgiving.” Universities hold events on how to "decolonize Thanksgiving" and question if it is even "right to celebrate Thanksgiving." We are even told by the media that A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is racist. They are purposely trying to destroy the holiday of Thanksgiving.
This is so damaging because one of the most important traits for people to have is a strong sense of gratitude. They say that people who have gratitude live much better lives than people who walk around thinking that the world owes them something. Studies have shown that, gratitude improves physical health, psychological health, self-esteem, sleep, mental health; it enhances empathy, reduces aggression, and improves relationships. We need to be grateful not just because we live in America, but because we are alive, we are healthy, we live in a time that is better than any other age that has ever existed.
It is the people who do not have gratitude for where they are in this present age are the ones who are destroying this present age for everyone else. These people who claim that America is infected with so-called “white privilege” and “male privilege”, are too privileged themselves to show gratitude for how fortunate they are in their own lives. Their eyes are filled with so much rage and hatred and judgement that they cannot see or acknowledge their privilege of living in America.
There is new trend for Thanksgiving these days - ‘how to get through Thanksgiving dinner with your relatives without talking politics or religion.’ Mark Twain once said, “Never discuss politics or religion in polite company”. Let me get this straight, tens of thousands of soldiers stormed the beaches at Normandy to protect our rights, such as freedom of speech, and we are going to self-censor? Talking politics and religion openly and freely is saying ‘thank you’ to every person who laid down their life to protect our rights to do just that.
Trying to get through Thanksgiving without talking about politics or religion is like saying, how do we get through the day without breathing? G.K. Chesterton said, “I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss.” Everything else is just a distraction. But that is the world that the powerful want us to live in. Sports, social media, screen time are all distractions from what is actually important in life. So, instead of being engaged in a passionate discussion about politics or religion at Thanksgiving dinner, they want us to have our heads buried in our screens or discussing our fantasy football teams or talking about Taylor Swift’s next concert tour. The powerful definitely do not want us to be talking about what is happening in politics today or being thankful for the United States of America.
We should be thankful for living in the Constitutional Republic where our rights are protected – freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of press – a dynamic that has never existed in other countries until it came to be in America. The landscape of human history is quite different than the country we live in. Most people who’ve ever lived, were subjects of the state, whether it was a dictatorship or a king or a despot or an oligarchy. Most people who’ve ever existed do not live as free people with the individual unalienable rights that we enjoy. Most people living today around the world, do not have the protected rights that we do. We should at least be grateful for that and have lively discussions about politics so we can protect those rights we are so grateful for.
But the people who do not want us to be thankful, the people who want to shut us up, who want to continually remind us of our past sins, and not even of our individual specific sins, but our collective sin that was committed by people in this country hundreds of years ago, don’t want us to look at our present-day life and be thankful for where we are. They want us to be reminded of bad things that happened decades and centuries before we were even born and allow those things to make us ungrateful for where we are today.
That is what the devil does. When people want to turn their lives around, especially through Christ, the devil always steps in and says ‘don’t you remember the sins you used to commit? You are not worthy of forgiveness; you are not worthy of salvation because of what you did in the past’. And they use your past sins to drag you back into your past life of sinfulness, so you cannot move forward into a better life. And that is precisely what these people are trying to do to us by claiming that we are not allowed to say “Happy Thanksgiving” because of bad things in America’s history, so we will turn our backs on everything that we should be grateful for.
Not only should we say, “Happy Thanksgiving”, we should shout it from the rooftops. Our defining emotion should be gratefulness and thankfulness for everything that we have, and appreciate not only where we are, but appreciate everyone who has sacrificed so much more than we’ve ever sacrificed to make America what it is today, to make our lives what they are today. And it is only when we were truly thankful and grateful for what we have today, will we be able to move forward into a better future.
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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.