A reminder for Thanksgiving and always.
A reminder for Thanksgiving and always
Dallas — For nine years, every November, just before Thanksgiving, I find myself in the same hotel (it’s now called the Beeman, and it’s just across from the George W. Bush presidential library at Southern Methodist University) in Dallas. As I write, I’ve just finished speaking with this year’s regional fellows in the National Review Institute’s Burke to Buckley program here. We have it in a number of cities, and I always close the eight-week program on gratitude as a civic virtue. Much of our discussion is rooted in the writings of William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review and NRI. He had a deep appreciation for the importance of stewardship of the gifts we have been given. Some of the readings that prepare the fellows for the session include Bill’s geeking out about the Oxford English Dictionary and Bach. After the hours of discussion — delightful, and yet a bit exhausting for an introvert — I’m grateful to come back to the hotel bar and find the welcoming presence of Francisco, the bartender I see here every year. So many things change, but he’s still there ready to give you a late-night meal or a drink and wish you a happy Thanksgiving.
I often do an examination of conscience about the role we’ve played here at National Review in contributing to an online culture of instant reaction. I remember Michael Ledeen once saying to me, as blogs and all were becoming a hot thing: Lopez, they don’t give awards for getting things wrong first! As the years have passed, I’ve had the luxury, being a wee bit more toward the National Review Institute side than the NRO side, to take some time to pause before writing. That’s a blessing of the tradition begun by Buckley, who welcomed it all. How do we appreciate the past and build on it in good stewardship, with both confidence and humility — and in the moment, but also with reflection and, we pray, some wisdom?
Over the years of these NRI programs, I have been humbled by the professional people who take the time to attend and to let some fundamental conservative principles marinate in their lives in a new way. They live in the same polarized political world we all do. And yet they want more. They want to lead better. They want to read more about how our contemporaries have managed it, thinking practically and even spiritually about it.
During this Texas trip I met an Uber driver who was very obviously a Marine (never “former”!). He wore a cap with a pin on it that said, “Cold War Veteran.” I wish I had asked him more about his service other than thanking him. His presence was a reminder of courageous leadership — even in politics — that was so crucial, and not so long ago. It’s still possible. If we remember, as Bill Buckley would say, the patrimony. We are not the ones we have been waiting for. All of human history has not been waiting for us to appear on the scene. And yet, we are here now for a reason, and all have our stewardship roles.
A favorite WFB speech of mine, which I often quote during the NRI Burke to Buckley sessions, and around Thanksgiving and Christmastime more generally, is a 1988 talk he gave to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which he said:
Our offense, however — the near universal offense, remarked on by Ortega y Gasset as the fingerprint of the masses in revolt — is that of the Westerner, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, who accepts without any thought the patrimony we all enjoy, those of us who live in the Free World. We are left with the numbing, benumbing thought that we owe nothing to Plato and Aristotle, nothing to the prophets who wrote the Bible, nothing to the generations who fought for freedoms activated by the Bill of Rights. We are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us. We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us, but to live without any sense of obligation to those who made possible lives as tolerable as ours, within the frame of the human predicament God imposed on us — without any sense of gratitude to our parents, who suffered to raise us; to our teachers, who labored to teach us; to the scientists, who prolonged the lives of our children when disease struck them down — is spiritually atrophying.
We cannot repay in kind the gift of the Beatitudes, with their eternal, searing meaning — Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude — defined here as appreciation, however rendered, of the best that we have, and a determined effort to protect and cherish it — our failure here marks us as the masses in revolt; in revolt against our benefactors, our civilization, against God himself.
To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak or . . . to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends, and, yes, the old lady in Stratford. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and prayers; and in our deeds.
We live at a time, of course, when even the concept of “thoughts and prayers” is under attack as meaningless. They are real things for those of us who believe that all good gifts come from God. And even if you are not sure about God, we did not show up on the scene and invent all that is good. There is history before us, and it’s not all to be canceled, but to be learned from.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving — and in the weeks leading up to Christmas and the new year — let’s choose to bear in mind that we are blessed and have life-giving responsibilities that will encourage others in ways that only Providence can fully transform for the fullest freedom. We just need to be humble and cooperate!
And never forget to thank the Franciscos in your life. Never let consistent, welcoming presences be transactional. It’s too easy for that to happen. But that’s not the life of gratitude!
(By the way: The National Review Institute is currently accepting applications for our New York, Miami, and Philadelphia Burke to Buckley programs. Details here. We can talk thanksgiving — gratitude as a civic virtue — even in the spring! And, I thank you for considering letting us keep in touch by subscribing to my free NRI semi-weekly e-mail here.)