Thanksgiving 2006

George Will channels British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson, who observes the American celebration of Thanksgiving from the outside:

His [Hodgson's] "A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving" makes clear that the Pilgrims embarked on the angry north Atlantic in storm season not because they wanted to impose their strict ways on anyone, but to avoid being bothered by anyone.

Kinda tells you where the true origins of the "Don't Tread on Me" standard (on the Gadsden flag, or the First Navy Jack) came from....anyway:

This year, when one of the Transportation Security Administration's 43,000 airport-security screeners confiscated a traveler's too-large tube of toothpaste, the traveler perhaps thought: Life is hard. So it is timely for Hodgson to remind us of the admiration that is due "as a tiny band of men and women, determined to follow what they believe to be the ordinances of their God, entrust themselves to the wild freezing ocean; confront disease, starvation, ferocious enemies and justified fear."

Thanksgiving, Hodgson notes, is an echo of the breaking of bread at the heart of Christian worship, and of a Jewish Seder. It also is a continuation, in today's abundance, of harvest festivals around the world, which began millennia ago, when abundance was so rare as to seem miraculous.

Hodgson thinks Thanksgiving expresses "the deepest of all American national feelings" - gratitude. It is the inclusive gratitude "of a nation of immigrants who have lived for the most part in peace and plenty under the rule of law as established with the consent of the governed."

An Englishman (Samuel Johnson) said that people more often need to be reminded than informed. Sometimes Americans need a sympathetic foreigner, such as Hodgson, to remind them of the dignity of what they are doing, on this day, and all others.

Indeed. Well spoken by Mr. Will and Mr. Hodgson.

Happy Thanksgiving!