Today I Choose Gratitude

As the culture simultaneously accelerates and disintegrates, I want to take today to express some gratitude. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, one of only a handful of American holidays worth a damn. Somehow Thanksgiving has managed to retain its original meaning without adopting a cartoon mascot or a corporate sponsor or a mattress sale; for those things alone we can be grateful.

All of us have much be thankful for as Americans. For all of its deep-seated dysfunction, this is a beautiful place. Geographically, it’s spectacular. If you’ve never taken a cross-country road trip, I recommend you do so at least once. By plane it’s impossible to get a sense of the nation’s vastness and its physical diversity. You want mountains? We got ‘em. Deserts? Boy howdy! Maybe you want open plains or deep forests or prairie. We got it all, and lots of it. We’ve got good land and great lakes. And yes, you can get in your car and drive from sea to shining sea.

The people here are good people. I know it doesn’t always seem that way on the news or social media. I know we don’t always present ourselves well to the rest of the world. I know we’re too often close-minded. But we’re also big-hearted. We’re optimists, even when the optimism isn’t necessarily warranted. We eat too much and drink too much and die too young. We make things, all kinds of things. We try hard and fail hard. Sometimes we succeed, too, which is all the sweeter when we’ve taken big risks to reach for something we may thought was beyond our grasp. We mow our lawns. We run coat drives and food drives. We still believe, somehow, in the gossamer American dream, even if we can’t quite our fingers on what exactly that dream entails. We’re no better than anybody else but nor are we worse. We’re just people, American people.

Thanksgiving is a day to gather with family and friends. It’s a day to acknowledge that we’ve got it pretty good, most of us, and to lend a hand to those who maybe have it a little worse. It’s a day for simple chores: cooking, cleaning. Activities that ground us to these people, this place. If you’re a person of faith, it can be a prayerful day. But there is nothing otherworldly about this day. When we give thanks, it can be to our higher power or just to the person seated beside us at the dinner table. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being my friend, thank you for allowing me to be yours. Thank you for this food and this day and the goodness we are giving ourselves over to in these few and fleeting hours. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It is a day to set the world’s problems aside for a moment. War will be there tomorrow. Creeping authoritarianism isn’t going anywhere, either. Discrimination and ugliness and petty hatred all with be with us when we wake up on Friday morning. But maybe we can take this day, this Thanksgiving, to soften our hearts for just a moment towards those whose values we oppose or, maybe, don’t understand. One of the things I’ve learned after traveling the country innumerable times over the years is that, for the most part, all of us want the same things. We want our kids to be happy and our communities safe. We want to wake up with purpose, to feel as though the things we do in this life matter to somebody else. We want to belong.

America hasn’t always done a good job of making people feel as though they belong, but it’s worth pausing our rancor for a moment to at least recognize that there are very few – are there any other? – nations dedicated to weaving together disparate people from every nook and cranny of the globe into some kind of cohesive whole. People come here because they believe they can find a little patch of land where they will be accepted, where they will be free to pursue their lives in the way they see fit. America is not fair, but at least it allows every citizen a chance to fight for fairness. We’re a nation of independent thinkers, people who turned their backs on everything they knew to try something new. To dream. This land that too many claim as “theirs” is all of ours now. However we got here, whatever horrors were committed in its founding, now it is ours to share. Sometimes we forget that, I think, and Thanksgiving is a good day of reminder. When we pass plates, we’re sharing food, history, cultures. We’re celebrating however we celebrate, the foods on our plates reminders of who we are and where we came from and, with thanks and gratitude, we look ahead to where we hope to go.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’ve been feeling funky for a while now and have written about it in these pages. But I’m also filled with gratitude. To my family. My wife, my children (whose names I can’t remember), to my friends and colleagues and to the good people I meet all the time. The guy who serves me chili at the Waffle House I stop at on my way home from playing poker. His name is Devin and he’s always cheerful at 3:00 in the morning. To Mr. Walter, who works at the hotel across the street from my home who greets me with the same cheeriness every single time he sees me. To Taj, who works at Kroger and jokes with me about being in the next Avengers movie because we work out at the same gym and he knows I’m an actor. To my friends Megan and Craig who are visiting us this afternoon. I hope I have earned all of their goodwill and good cheer. I’m grateful for whoever reads this words. I’m grateful, too, for another day to do some small good in this challenging and fucked-up world. We’re imperfect, we Americans. We often don’t live up to who we claim to be. Our voices are too often raised when our ears should be open. But for one more year at least I choose to believe in the fading American flag. I choose to believe we can refresh its colors. There are other days to choose rancor. Today I choose peace. Today I choose gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving.