It can save a life — and civilization.
It can save a life — and civilization.
‘W e are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us,” National Review magazine founder William F. Buckley remarked in 1988 in a speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.
It’s easy for the holidays at year’s end to become routine — even stressful — but we really must insist upon reflection. Every time I’ve walked past a torn-down Israeli-hostage sign on a New York City streetlamp this fall, I’ve thought about how we don’t learn the lessons of history and don’t remember what is most important. We’re having the same miserable old debates and might be on track to elect the same old (and we can emphasize that) for president, but what we really need to do is get ourselves undistracted from our phones and our ideological silos and appreciate that we have things in common and worth fighting for.
“We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us,” WFB, as we call Buckley in our parts, continued. “But to live without any sense of obligation to those who made possible lives as tolerable as ours: 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.” He voiced an acknowledgment of God — something that leads us to a humility that is impossible if we think all that we are and can be is in our own power.
Last year, in the magazine First Things, Grove City College professor Carl Trueman wrote about “Our Age of Ingratitude.” (Grove City is a campus I always find inspiring to visit and got to this year.) He noted the language about privilege — that in our current culture, if you have blessings in your life, you are somehow expected to apologize for them, do penance for them, rather than give thanks for them. The fate of the language of privilege is also significant here. “I, for one, refuse to oblige,” he writes. “Yes, I am privileged: I grew up in a home where my mother and father loved each other, stayed together through thick and thin, and provided my sisters and myself with opportunities that had been denied to them because of their own working-class upbringing — most obviously, the opportunity to study at college,” he continued. “Mine was thus a privileged childhood — but my mother and father did not build their marriage and family at the cost of those of somebody else. They worked hard to love each other and to provide a loving home. I was the recipient of privilege. But the appropriate response to such privilege is not to feel guilty. It is to feel gratitude. To do otherwise would be to sin against my parents.”
And it’s a sin to not work for that for others.
An immigrant from England, Trueman is grateful to both his native and his adopted lands. In recent weeks, I’ve seen too many families on the streets of Manhattan being processed in a midtown hotel, having come over the border from Mexico. Someone likely stole their money and lied to them about what would happen when they found themselves in the United States. It’s a blessing not to be in that situation. And what more can civil society do to help families flourish in both the most basic and desperate situations?
Trueman quotes the late Sir Roger Scruton, who, at the end of his life, wrote, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” Trueman adds: “We live in an age marked by infantile ingratitude. And if Scruton is right, that means we live in an age when we do not really know how to live at all. Ingratitude has dehumanized us.”
BraveLove is one of my favorite examples today of gratitude. BraveLove is dedicated to giving thanks to birth mothers. One of their most recent videos is of a 17-year-old named Emmah. She herself admits that the testimony is still “raw,” but she is bursting, too, with gratitude: “I don’t want to take a child’s life away when he can be an amazing person, a person I get to know.” She had no idea about open adoption and, as hard as it was to sign the final papers, she was grateful to spend time with her baby, whom she considers “a blessing in disguise.” She didn’t ever expect that she would be pregnant before she was married, but amid all the emotions radiates thanksgiving for life and for both her own supportive family and the couple who adopted her son.
Emmah’s is not an easy story — life rarely is. But the more we tell these stories and give cultural permission for gratitude, the more the anger that we see on the streets, in our universities, in our politics, at family gatherings, on social media, and so many other places will be seen as that infantile attitude, ingratitude, a word that Scruton deplored. Buckley and Trueman and Emmah’s sentiments are pleas for us to be more human — in our own lives, in knowing, even with the suffering, that we are blessed — and to be more human to one another. Being basket cases of ingratitude means wasting time in our short lives. As another year ends, please, never again, on so many levels and fronts.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.