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A few words on Thanksgiving

This is my editorial for tomorrow’s newspaper. It’s free preview, as it were. Hope you enjoy it, and that everyone reading enjoys a relaxing and joyful Thanksgiving holiday.

Their Spirit: Plymouth’s Lessons Hold True Today

Like all European settlers who crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the English separatists at Plymouth faced tremendous adversity in the New World. Tradition holds that, after enduring a brutal New England winter, they marked their first successful harvest with a festival of Thanksgiving, the origins of the modern holiday.

Those earliest Americans had great faith that together they could survive, even thrive, in the face of whatever challenges they found building new lives in unfamiliar surroundings. Their example is one to emulate, as this nation can best face its modern adversity by finding strength and confidence in one another.

Though it now holds a place on the national calendar, a holiday of Thanksgiving was intended to mark a special moment in the life of a community or a nation. Most countries celebrate some type of harvest festival, and the United States is no different in that regard. But days of Thanksgiving were declared in the nation’s infancy only when circumstances and events dictated.

That is how the Plymouth settlers would have seen it. Not only had faith sustained them through harmful conditions, but they were confident that God had provided them remarkable abundance and they were grateful. Their Thanksgiving would have been modest given the nature of their religion, but would have reflected their faith in overcoming all obstacles through resilience, hard work and cooperation.

In 1933, at the worst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt summoned that spirit in his Thanksgiving Proclamation. It called on Americans to be grateful, “for the passing of dark days; for the new spirit of dependence one on another; for the closer unity of all parts of our wide land … for the brighter day to which we can win through by seeking the help of God in a more unselfish striving for the common bettering of mankind.”

Those words — and that spirit — speak to the nation now as it battles adversity in an economic recession, amid two wars and with conflict a seeming constant in modern life. Americans have faced greater obstacles only to topple them with the qualities that saw the Plymouth settlers through that first winter in the New World.

Today’s holiday finds the nation confronting many challenges, but they are no more daunting than what people on this continent have faced before. Americans will thrive with resilience, hard work and trust in one another, and for that we should give thanks.

Why We Tumbl

newsweek:

Why do we Tumbl? In the end, we use Tumblr not because it’s a great way to connect with our readers (though it is that), or because we believe this or something like it is a part of a new way forward for interaction between publishers and audience (though we think that too). We use Tumblr because it’s fun and while, you know, you can’t eat fun, or trade it in for fistfulls of dollars to fund serious journalism, we believe there’s a value in doing things we like simply because we like to do them, and that hopefully our fellow Tumblrs will too.

As part of the same profession and similarly employed by an industry that seems to have a dwindling future in its current form, I need to ruminate on this for a while.