Forget Politics. Try Gratitude Instead

G ratitude. It shouldn’t be that hard. Everything we have is a gift. Beginning with our very lives. That’s not the stuff of politics much anymore. We are not in the days of “Morning in America.” We live at a time when anger and tearing others down is the trend. But that’s not going to work when we need hope.

This might sound silly, but out walking one day during the Covid lockdowns, I encountered a new flower with the most enchanting powdery scent. It was such a simple thing but also glorious. On another evening, I heard a birds’ concert — it’s just what they do and who they are. Small, natural and yet magnificent things.

At National Review and the National Review Institute, we are preparing to celebrate the centenary of William F. Buckley Jr.’s — our founder’s — birth next year. It has already offered us an exciting and encouraging opportunity to remember what we could be. And what we are meant to be both morally and politically.

Bill was convinced about stewardship — about the fact that we are not the people the world has been waiting for. He was in awe about things we should all be in awe of: Bach, even the Oxford English Dictionary. About the United States of America, he said in 1979 — one of my favorite things he ever said — that it captured so much about not just religious freedom but the essence of humanity: “The Constitution of the United States, and in particular the Bill of Rights, is essentially a list of prohibitions: but it is a list of things that the government cannot do to the people. What a huge distinction: a majestic distinction.”

It even gets better. The Bill of Rights “grew out of a long, empirical journey, the eternal spark of which, of course, traces to Bethlehem, to that star that magnified man beyond any power of the emperors and gold seek­ers and legions of soldiers and slaves: a star that implanted in each one of us that essence that separates us from the beasts, and tells us that we were made in the image of God and were meant to be free.”

One of the points Bill made again and again was about our patrimony. We’ve been given so much from so many who came before us. As he put it: “To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak or . . . to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham, Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends, and, yes, the old lady in Stratford.”

He said: “We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and prayers; and in our deeds.”

He wrote long sentences, but they were worth it. “America cannot presume to offer itself up, in a frenzy of moral vani­ty, as the secular reflection of the Incarnation. But Americans can say, as Lincoln did, that our country was founded on a proposition: that government of the people, by the people, and for the people is of the nature of Americanism. That our ideals are proudly ours.”

He continued: “If I have contributed to the maintenance of those ideals, then I am happy and proud that you should say so. If I haven’t, then accept my word that any failure of mine is a failure of will and intelligence, and no reflection on the ideals of America or on your charity in thinking of me in the same august breath.”

Imagine if we could recover this sense of reverence. Religious faith is not necessary for our republic to work, but an appreciation of it is. Even those of us who aren’t believers can make the important acknowledgement that it’s helpful to have believers in the mix. They can make for good neighbors and even be agents of cultural change. And yet, in our time, the very concept of “thoughts and prayers” is maligned.

“We cannot repay in kind the gift of the Beatitudes, with their eternal, searing meaning — Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” Bill Buckley once said. “But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude — defined here as appreciation, however rendered, of the best that we have, and a determined effort to protect and cherish it — our failure here marks us as the masses in revolt; in revolt against our benefactors, our civilization, against God himself.”

If we had this realization daily, it could change the world and our lives, even our politics.

None of us can predict the future of American politics. But what we have in our power is gratitude. And it can be culturally contagious.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.