Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post notes (correctly, IMO) that gratitude is much more an action than a feeling and asks his readers to take specific actions to express gratitude.
Let’s start with the proposition that gratitude is an indispensable virtue. It is an acknowledgment that we owe our good fortune in significant part to the efforts of others who work on our behalf and to the circumstances in which we were born. Sheer, unearned good luck plays a big part in all success stories.
Gratitude is thus a close cousin to humility: It is an admission that we cannot claim that anything we have achieved was accomplished by ourselves alone. It therefore pushes against selfish forms of individualism and has “the potential of reinforcing communal ties,” as philosopher Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald noted.
In his 1998 essay “Gratitude and Justice,” he argued that, properly understood, gratitude has three components: “(1) appreciation, (2) goodwill, and (3) a disposition to act in a way that flows from this appreciation and goodwill.”
It’s the third piece that we always need to work on, and the disposition to act on our gratitude can have wondrous effects if we take it seriously — on the lives of those close to us and on our nation as a whole.
I agree with Mr. Dionne but I get to that point of agreement a bit differently.
I spent years and years in 12-Step recovery sessions quite resentful at the notion of “grace.” For the most part, it’s because the notions and the very states of “grace” that I was familiar with seemed to emanate from a god that I did not (and do not) believe in.
And then one day I decided to look up the etymology of the word “grace” and noted that it had something of a shared etymology with the word and idea of “gratitude.”
I can understand “gratitude” and consider it a necessity.
If gratitude and humility are what Dionne describes as “close cousins” than gratitude and grace are siblings.
Indeed, even in this short excerpt I posted here, Dionne says as much...only that the “good fortune” emanates not from a god or gods or even ourselves but from “efforts of others who work on our behalf and to the circumstances in which we were born.”
And that, I can agree with.
Mark Osler of The Atlantic writes about the legal, historical, and even aesthetic dangers posed by The Damn Fool’s pardon of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Clemency has been a part of legal systems going back to the Code of Hammurabi. The ancient Jews had a tradition of granting freedom to a prisoner as part of the Passover festival. The Romans had a goddess of clemency, Clementia. I found out about her when I messed up an internet search and discovered Roman coins for sale that bore her name. The coins were surprisingly affordable—the Romans made so many of them—so I bought several and gave them to others who work to free people in prison. Some of those people, including the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, carry them around in their pockets like I do, a tiny symbol of something old and good.
The Framers of the Constitution were wary of the power of kings, yet they included clemency in our founding document. As a Christian, I would love to say that the embrace of the pardon flowed from Christian belief, but that probably is true only for some of the Framers. Just as influential might have been the Bard. Educated Americans at the end of the 18th century lived in a cult of Shakespeare; busts of him were common in upper-class homes, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams even made a joint pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1786. Shakespeare, in his plays, came back again and again to the idea of mercy. Measure for Measure is expressly about governmental pardoning, and the power of mercy is a central theme in many of Shakespeare’s other works, including The Tempest—a performance of which George Washington attended during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer welcomes a return to boredom.
There’s a perfect storm of reasons why Biden is spurning the pizazz of a Warren or a Rice — well-known to addicts of TV’s Sunday news shows — for the facial-recognition-foiling likes of Blinken and Mayorkas. The biggest one, in my opinion, is a wise political gamble by Team Biden — that smart, boring and anonymous is exactly what nearly 80 million Americans voted for this fall. Call it, cynically, a return to brunch without political agita for the Democrats’ new base of college-educated suburbanites, or call it a rejection of Donald Trump’s non-stop vulgar circus — but most of “Resistance Twitter” is in love with the Big Dull.
When I commented on Twitter at the start of Thanksgiving Week that the surest route to Biden’s Cabinet was to be an “unknown, qualified and boringly non-controversial deputy cabinet secretary under Barack Obama,” I got a flood of responses tsk-tsk-ing me for implying that “boring” was a bad thing. “As long as they know how to do their job with skill, honesty and decency, they can stay as unknown as they wish to be,” one wrote, while another added (and I agree with this), “Given what we just went through, I’ll take boring, as long as competent is going along with it.”
Two career Foreign Service officials, William J. Burns and Linda Thomas-Greenfield write for Foreign Affairs about needed changes at the U.S. State Department.
The wreckage at the State Department runs deep. Career diplomats have been systematically sidelined and excluded from senior Washington jobs on an unprecedented scale. The picture overseas is just as grim, with the record quantity of political appointees serving as ambassadors matched by their often dismal quality. The most recent ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, seemed intent on antagonizing as many Germans as he could—not only with ornery lectures but also through his support for far-right political parties. The ambassador in Budapest, David Cornstein, has developed a terminal case of “clientitis,” calling Hungary’s authoritarian, civil-liberties-bashing leader “the perfect partner.” And the U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Jeffrey Ross Gunter, has churned through career deputies at a stunning pace, going through no fewer than seven in less than two years at his post.
In Washington, career public servants who worked on controversial issues during the Obama administration, such as the Iran nuclear negotiations, have been smeared and attacked, their careers derailed. Colleagues who upheld their constitutional oaths during the Ukraine impeachment saga were maligned and abandoned by their own leadership. In May, the State Department’s independent inspector general, Steve Linick, was fired after doing what his job required him to do: opening an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s alleged personal use of government resources. Battered and belittled, too many career officials have been tempted to go along to get along. That undercuts not only morale but also a policy process that depends on apolitical experts airing contrary views, however inconvenient they may be to the politically appointed leadership.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield is, of course, President-Elect Joe Biden’s nominee to become United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
I especially like this observation by Mr. Burns and Ms. Thomas-Greenfield:
Although the transformation of the State Department into a more expeditionary and agile institution was healthy in many respects, it was also distorting. It was tethered to a fundamentally flawed strategy—one that was too narrowly focused on terrorism and too wrapped up in magical thinking about the United States’ supposed power to transform regions and societies.
Katherine Eban writes for Vanity Fair on how The Damn Fool’s delaying of the transition hobbles the efforts of President-Elect Joe Biden’s COVID Task Force.
There could be as many as four different COVID-19 vaccines, each of which needs to be stored, handled, and dosed differently, with different timing for follow-up doses. Anyone who transports, receives, stores, or administers a vaccine needs to be trained. With medical staff exhausted, and short on PPE, how will they be trained, and how will they administer it? With only 20 million doses at first, who will receive it? How will individuals know if they’re part of a high-risk group that can cut to the front of the line?
“We have to know what the plan is,” said the task force member. “Everyone along the way has to be trained on the plan.” Even if all that goes swimmingly, you “have to have a person who wants to take it.” On that count, the branding has not helped. The name Warp Speed “has not been an appealing word for a lot of people,” said the task force member, as it has stirred concerns that the development has been “recklessly fast.”
Wendy Dean and Simon G. Talbot of STATnews on the ever increasing dangers of burnout by frontline health care workers.
It is time for leaders of hospitals and health care systems to add another, deeper layer of support for their staff by speaking out publicly and collectively in defense of science, safety, and public health, even if it risks estranging patients and politicians.
Long before the pandemic emerged, the relationships between health care organizations and their staffs were already strained by years of cost-cutting that trimmed staffing levels, supplies, and space to the bone. Driven by changes in health care reimbursement structures, systems were “optimized” to the point that they were continually running at what felt like full capacity, with precious little slack to accommodate minor surges, much less one the magnitude of a global pandemic.
We are now facing a convergence of two cataclysms: the abject failure of preparedness driven by the dogma that market forces can best shape health care, and the catastrophic failure at the highest levels of leadership in the U.S. to adequately address and control the pandemic. Health care workers are left to manage in the ensuring chaos feeling disposable, devalued, and demoralized.
Wearing a mask — the best prevention against a pathogen for which there are no curative therapeutic measures — is optional in 26 states. Pandemic isolation fatigue is real and large gatherings are increasingly common. Thanksgiving celebrations will likely fuel the spread of Covid-19. Deborah Birx’s uncharacteristically sharp warning to the White House, “We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic,” adding that, “… an aggressive, balanced approach … is not being implemented,” belies her grave concern.
Bryce Covert writes for The Nation that the Centers for Disease Control’s moratorium on evictions to curb the spread of Covid-19 is proving to be quite ineffective.
The CDC eviction ban was explicitly implemented because, the agency said, “the evictions of tenants could be detrimental to public health control measures to slow the spread of SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.” But housing advocates and attorneys across the country say that the ban’s lack of clarity and enforcement means that judges are still allowing evictions to move forward in many places. The CDC has only exacerbated the problem since issuing that initial declaration.
In October, the agency issued an FAQ saying that landlords can take every action in the eviction process up to actually removing someone from a home. That means many tenants will be threatened with an eviction and simply choose to move, rather than risk the ordeal or having an eviction on their record. And once the moratorium lifts on December 31, a flood of cases will be teed up such that people will face immediate removal. The FAQ “made an already challenged order worse,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.
The FAQ also explicitly allowed landlords to challenge tenants on the veracity of their declarations. Some courts are going as far as holding evidentiary hearings over them... That’s not how the declarative statement that tenants sign should work, says Yentel. “The whole point of having a declarative statement [is that] when it’s difficult to prove something, you sign under the threat of perjury that it’s true,” she explains. That should spare tenants from having to gather evidence that they qualify, evidence that could be difficult or impossible to piece together. Renters also face perjury charges if they are found not to qualify after signing a declaration. That’s having “a chilling effect,” said Emily Benfer, a visiting professor of law at Wake Forest University. “The majority of tenants, who already understand that the eviction system is tilted toward the landlord’s favor, will not expect it to uphold their rights. So why would they gamble with their liberty?”
I excerpted a portion of Mary Mitchell’s Chicago Sun-Times column last night in the OND; here, I excerpt another portion of her thoughts on this Thanksgiving Day.
Lord, help us to be our brother’s keeper.
Some of us, particularly young folk, are still feeling invincible despite the COVID-19 surge.
But after eight months of fighting this global pandemic, we should all be aware that when we fail to take measures that health professionals say will keep us safe, we are putting at risk the lives of people who don’t have a choice.
We call them essential workers, but they can’t work from home and they can’t avoid interactions with others.
They are the strangers that we don’t even think about until we are in need of their services, like nurses, cabdrivers, maintenance workers and post office workers.
Tragically, more than 12,000 people have died in Illinois from the coronavirus, and we are in the middle of a surge that health professionals predict could kill 1,000 more people before the year ends.
To put those deaths into perspective, the city has reached 700 homicides so far in 2020, a milestone that most Chicagoans find alarming.
Finally this morning, I ran across this 2013 column by John Hanc, writing for Smithsonian magazine, on some old-time menus for hotel dining on Thanksgiving Day.
The reason a Thanksgiving Day spent anywhere but home seems so jarring today, is due in large part to the power of a painting: Norman Rockwell’s 1943 “Freedom from Want”—part of the famous “Four Freedoms” series that Rockwell painted as part of the effort to sell War Bonds. Published on the cover of the March 6, 1943 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, the painting depicts a kindly-looking, white-haired patriarch and matriarch standing at the head of the table, as hungry family members—their smiling faces only partially visible—eagerly anticipate the mouth-watering turkey dinner that’s about to be served.
But Rockwell’s idealized Thanksgiving celebration is not the way it’s always been; it could even be argued that the idea of a tightly-knit family celebration at home would have been unfamiliar to even the Pilgrims.
“The meal we harken back to in 1621, is a totally anomalous situation to the way we think about it today,” says Kathleen Wahl, a culinarian and 17th-century food expert at Plimouth Plantation, the living history museum of the Pilgrim period in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “You have about 50 English people whose families were torn apart, by death or distance. It’s like a very modern, make-do family. Family is your neighbors, it’s whoever happens to be in the situation with you.”
The first time that I’d heard of hotel/restaurant dining on Thanksgiving Day was when an administrator at Florida A&M told me that she and her husband began to eat out on Thanksgiving Day once their children were older and out of the house (this was back in the 1980’s). I get the impression that dining out of Thanksgiving Day is a tradition, of sorts, that never really went away but, of course, these are the days of the pandemic so there won’t be much of any of that this year.
Everyone have a good morning and a Great...and Safe Thanksgiving Day.