The Country Curmudgeon: A day for thanks
By Roy Hicks
Friday, November 28, 2008 10:40 AM PST
A traditional Thanksgiving hymn goes, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. He chastens and hastens His will to make known. The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing. Sing praises to His Name: He forgets not his own!”
Let’s hope so. It’s difficult not to comment on politics, but let’s set that aside for today.
Our beloved country is unquestionably headed for some difficult times. “The wicked oppressing” are right at our doorstep, friends. The threats to our existence form a very long list, but today let’s thank the Lord for the many blessings he has bestowed upon us and we can still enjoy.
No question, America as we have known it all our lives has been the gift of a kindly and generous God rewarding us for being a humble and thankful Christian people. This started in 1620 with the arrival of the English pilgrims at Massachusetts in 1620, of which my ancestor Mary Chilton — the first Englishwoman to set foot on Plymouth Rock — happened to be one. You can look it up in the rosters of the Mayflower Society. I am as “native American” as anyone in the country today, and I’m fiercely proud of that.
The Massachusetts pilgrims of 1620 and those of the Selden and Howard members of the New Jersey Company who followed shortly thereafter had a very hard lot. Mary Chilton seems to have died during that first year, but apparently some of her children survived, else I would not be here.
The first Thanksgiving was a day ordered by Gov. William Bradford of the Massachusetts colony in 1621, joining the American Indians with whom they’d made friends upon their arrival in the New World. Although that was a feast mainly provided by their Indian neighbors, the pilgrims did not have much to be thankful for. Of those who landed at Plymouth Rock, nearly half of them died during their first brutal winter.
Today, we have much to be thankful for. The fledgling country of 388 years ago did indeed survive and prosper to become the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Collectively, we survived a seemingly impossible war for independence against the mightiest nation on earth, and, since then, our country has gained global eminence through a bloody civil war and has become the most staunch defender of liberty against “all enemies, both foreign and domestic” through two World Wars. We have — as President Franklin Roosevelt once declared — become the “arsenal of democracy” — a position from which we must never retreat.
Thanks to our heroic predecessors, we are still the mightiest nation on earth. Let us never forget that, nor abandon our obligation to the rest of a weary world still groaning under the oppression of brutal armed tyranny around the globe.
More soberly, let us never forget the Lord’s blessings are not promised to us forever. If we continue down our current path of abortion, the promotion and distribution of pornography, lending our social approval to such obscenities as homosexual marriage and the like, the blessings we have always enjoyed can be revoked overnight.
That we can still enjoy our priceless individual freedoms and celebrate this most special day with family banquets of luxuries like roasted turkey with all the trimmings of mashed ’taters, oceans of rich gravy and jellied cranberry preserves is indeed a day for thanks to the almighty God who has smiled upon and blessed our nation for all the years of our history. For that, we should each give most reverent and heartfelt thanks today.
Roy Hicks, a Payette resident, writes a weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Hicks can be directed to: Roy Hicks, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario, OR 97914
