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Giving Thanks
Our Thanksgiving family tradition is to go around the table and express gratitude for our blessings. It’s such a simple exercise, and yet almost as satisfying as the feasting. Maybe we shouldn’t confine it to Thanksgiving? We have observant Jewish friends who’ve done something like this every week at Shabbat dinners. Each person cites a “highlight of the week.” It sets a tone.
For me there is a spiritual dimension to giving thanks. But even from a purely instrumental perspective, there is good evidence that gratitude increases happiness. As the Harvard Healthbeat newsletter reports, a number of studies have tested this. Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami designed a study in which participants were divided into three groups. The first was encouraged to record things that had gone well for them. The second took notes on things that irritated them. And the third just wrote down matters that had affected them for good or ill. At the end of 10 weeks, those who wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. As a group they also exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than the other study participants.
Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania tested a number of interventions on a group of 411 participants. When they were tasked with writing and delivering a letter of thanks to someone who had never been properly appreciated for an act of kindness, their happiness scores shot up, and the effects lingered for a full month.
We’ve focused a lot in the past few years about the darker aspects of human nature – our tribalism, our confirmation bias, our love of aggression – but those are not the whole story. If that were all humans were capable of, we’d all be lost. Consider than even in the sewer that Twitter can be, you will find stories of heroism, kindness to animals (have you seen the one about good Samaritans helping bear cubs escape from a dumpster?), and appreciation for the struggles of the handicapped.
The following people have not done anything near as great as saving bear cubs, but they deserve honorable mention. I hereby express gratitude to the commentators and other public figures who have kept their equilibrium in a difficult time. Some of the conservatives who have helped keep me sane: Jay Nordlinger, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, Anne Applebaum, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, George Will, Yuval Levin, David Frum, Peter Wehner, Matt Lewis, Eliot Cohen, Bari Weiss, David French, Steve Hayes, and many more.
I am also grateful for a band of indomitable optimists who hope to preserve a humane and enlightened Republican Party: Sarah Longwell, Bill Kristol, Charlie Sykes, and Linda Chavez.
I am likewise deeply appreciative of those on the center left who have reached out to find common ground as tectonic plates shift: Benjamin Wittes, Rachel Pritzker, Ian Bassin, Mike Berkowitz, Bill Maher, Yascha Mounk, and many more.
The past two years have sparked a deeper gratitude for those stubborn non-conformists, the libertarians. We may disagree on some subjects (heck, I don’t even agree with myself 100 percent of the time), but I respect their adherence to principle, which, in our time, feels almost antique: Jerry Taylor, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Michael Moynihan, Kmele Foster, Brink Lindsay, and many more.
I am grateful to the voters who rewarded more centrist Democrats over more extreme progressives in 2018. Whether the party will get the message is another matter. I am grateful to Republicans like Ben Sasse, Bob Corker, and Jeff Flake. Lindsay Graham? Some days. I hope he has a wonderful holiday.
I am thankful every single day for the genius founders of this country, who designed a system that is proving pretty near fool proof.
And finally, this may surprise you, I’m grateful that Donald Trump is not turning out to be quite as unstable as I feared. He thunders and fumes and has temper tantrums, yes, and he undermines important civic virtues daily. He is the antithesis of grace. He may well set back the cause of conservative governance by a generation, but he seems to be talked out of most of his craziest impulses. His presidency is feeling less like rabies and more like malaria. You can survive malaria.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Published in General
Didn’t read it. Just searched for the term ‘Trump’ to see if she would use the occasion of Thanksgiving and a time when our nation tries to be thankful as a platform for denigrating our President.
Yup.
She says, among other things that he is “the antithesis of grace”.
I’ll allow as how he doesn’t exhibit much grace.
Kinda like politicizing Thanksgiving in a nationally syndicated column.
Mona,
I too am thankful. I am thankful for the average American who against the advice of media, intelligentsia, and bureaucracy are still capable of seeing the truth and acting on it. Every day they are bombarded with perversity, decadence, and the promoters thereof. Of course, the only way to promote those things is to make those who aren’t interested out to be dangerous, cruel, or prejudiced. Whether it is the corruption of values or the destruction of economic opportunity these forces like all parasites will destroy the host which they are living off. Yet the average American with few resources and fewer choices soldiers on against this strong wind of evil.
Imagine the hopelessly spoiled parasites that infest Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the Beltway, getting into a tiny sailing ship and making for a new uncharted continent to found a colony. Of course, you can’t! Don’t be ridiculous. Parasites aren’t pioneers and those who can’t tell the difference are part of the problem.
You blithely compare the President of the United States to a disease. You anoint the pedantic, the spoiled, and the corrupt with glory. This is how you give thanks. No thanks.
Gd gave me a Trump. I certainly didn’t do anything to get the Trump as I had no idea even what a Trump was. After two years I know what a Trump is and I also know what lying conniving parasites are capable of. I thank Gd for the Trump every day.
BTW, we Orthodox celebrate two days of Thanksgiving here in the diaspora. (It’s a joke.)
Regards,
Jim
Lindsey Graham escapes John McCain’s shadow and finds testicular fortitude and now Mona has issues with him? I’m thankful for Lindsey Graham 2.0 and we don’t want the original back if the pod is discovered in the Capitol basement.
Nobody’s perfect.
It’s very telling that, even in a Thanksgiving piece, the author cannot put aside her extreme bitterness towards Trump, rather lamely disguised as a backhanded compliment. Reasonable people can have significant differences of opinion on his Presidency, but there are certain days when those opinions should be set aside. On and around this day, the last paragraph is uncalled for, even considering Ms. Charen’s body of work on our President. How unfortunate for her and for Ricochet for reproducing it.
Read the whole darn thing. She is not politicizing Thanksgiving. It is a wonderful column. Filled with things for which, and for whom, she is grateful.
Thank you, Mona.
No.
True. She is politicizing her Thanksgiving column – using the occasion of our national holiday of counting blessings to denigrate the President of the US.
No amount of warm fuzzies or finer feelings can prevent the stripped gears and smoking engine of the penultimate paragraph from totaling the column.
No amount of writing will ever convince you that you are wrong. But be assured: As sure as night follows day, you as wrong as wrong can be. And you compound your error by refusing to read the full column.
Kind of self-congratulatory for a piece on gratefulness. Certainly you have every right to appreciate only those with whom you agree–to the delight of many, for sure. I just wish you had more than one take on things, that is, critiquing the ignoble madding crowd. I also find it more than a little self-serving that you mention the group you and other lapsed Republicans have only recently begun but not National Review or Ricochet or those who read your work and listen to your podcasts. I think it belies an emotional rigidity on your part that undercuts your obvious bravery.
All that said, I am thankful for your podcasts and columns because they have interested me and helped me become more disciplined in my own way of thinking, however often I fail to follow through. I agree with so much of what you say. I would appreciate them more, though, if they contained a little more wonder and a lot less my way or the highway.