Too Many Blessings, Too Little Appreciation

This is the time of the year, as the daylight grows shorter, temperatures dip and even the slightest breeze adds a crispness to the air, that many of us grow more introspective most especially as we watch the pages on the calendar signal that the start of another year is growing closer.

As has been so often the case for us in recent years and memory, the pause for the holiday season, seems to come at a ‘just in time’ moment as we take stock and recharge our emotional batteries.

Meanwhile, across our country, those struggling to make a better life for themselves, their families, and their communities have as long a road ahead of them as they did a year ago. Progress, such as it is, sometimes seems to be more in the eye of the beholder rather than milestones on the way to a safe harbor of dignity and safety.

When many of us, sadly not all of us, gather on Thursday to celebrate ourselves, one another, and the stories of our histories, we should resolve to use this holiday season to begin to remake the world in which we all live into a better place. And not just for the hungry, the hurting, the homeless, or the hopeless but for all of us.

We cannot do everything, but each of us can do something and when you add together all of our somethings, what we will have accomplished is greater than the sum of each individual together.

Not everyone will be able to celebrate, beginning with the men and women of our armed forces serving in places and situations neither of us have ever heard of, in defense of a way of life we too often take for granted. Remember, too, cops on the corner, emergency response teams, and all those assigned to 'holiday staffing’ duty or readying for "Black Friday" sales mania.

I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I have seen a lot of John Wayne movies, Pilgrim, and unlike the original Thanksgiving, it's not the food or the calendar that makes a holiday. It's the people with whom we share it.

Some of us will spend part of the day counting our blessings and pining over what we don't have. That inventory and regret make us who we are as a species, but perhaps in the 2,592,000 seconds between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, we can spend one of them being grateful for all that we have. 

-bill kenny