He gives four reasons for being grateful. I talked about the first three in my last three posts: that he and his people were alive during such an interesting era, that they lived in the comparative freedom and safety of America, and that they (especially the students present) were able to get a college education.
His concluding reason is short but interesting:
“In the last place, but by no means last in importance, one good ground of gratitude today — if I am grateful — is just the plain, simple fact that I am grateful. All the joy that is to be had, of this one life which we have to live, is ours for the mere price of recognizing it when it comes. It is entirely up to me whether I face the morning with a scowl or a smile. Whether my books are a drudgery or a delight. Whether my business downtown is a bore and a burden, or a source of happiness. Whether my home duties are irksome or pleasant. Whether my thoughts bring me satisfaction or pain.
“My mind, to me, a kingdom is. And as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is.
“And the kingdom of God is within us. All happiness and contentment is generated inside ourselves. Therefore, it is a great thing just to be thankful — just to be conscious of the largeness and richness of our lives. And, if we are thankful, it goes without saying that we shall want to help our fellow-pilgrims to the same happy and contented state of mind. For this habit of thankful, grateful contentment with life makes for steadiness of character, strength of purpose, inner peace, and the poise which all men covet.
“Thus endowed, we master many a grief and overcome many a disappointment that would crush us, but for this spiritual power.”
He gives four reasons for being grateful. The first (which I talked about in the previous post) was the fact that he and his people were alive during such an interesting era.
The second: “I am glad that I am permitted to live in this country. How would you like to be spending the only life you have to live in Russia these days? [The revolution in Russia had begun two years earlier and was still going on.] Or would you have preferred Armenia? [Their fate was uncertain in 1919.] How about Germany? [Having lost the war, they were expected to pay everyone else’s bills.] Can you think of any other country on the face of the earth that could offer you as much of advantage — security — liberty — and general satisfaction as this land in which we live?
“To be sure, we, too, are in a maze of serious problems; but they are not problems of how to deal with hardships so much as how to deal with excessive prosperity. It is not our poverty that has bothered us but our marvelous national riches.
“We are not now worried over the problem of trying to secure a larger liberty, but how to regulate those who would abuse the liberties that have been tendered them with such prodigality. Our industrial problem, for example, does not consist of a situation in which labor has more work than it really ought to be asked to do, but how to give the laboring man a contented mind, now that he has so much time on his hands to fret about the limitations of his job.
“Our problems are serious; but they are all problems arising out of progress, and not of repression or slavery. Any child in this country who wants an education can get it, and when he completes what the state has to offer him, absolutely free of cost, he has the equivalent of the education offered by the average college only twenty-five years ago.
“Any child who is lacking in mentality can find a safe refuge where his small capacities are trained to the utmost. A little while ago, the village idiot roamed the streets, either as an object of ridicule or crude and bungling sympathy of curious neighbors. In almost all the other nations of the world, such condition obtains at this hour. Here, the little child with the lame foot is invited by the state to come and be made whole, at the expense of the people.
“There is very little actual misfortune in America for which no remedy has been devised. There never was a more tenderhearted, more philanthropic nation known to human history. With all our obvious blunders, our mad rush, our almost insane desire to take shortcuts to prosperity (in the course of which we miss much, if not most, of the real satisfaction of life); with all our hard driving, and fierce competition, we are obliged to admit that our America, today, is, by all counts, the most livable country in the world.
“We can be thankful that it has been given to us to spend what little time is allotted to us on earth, right here in the United States.”
The first, he says, “is that we are alive in this remarkably interesting period of the world’s life…. [W]e seem to have but one brief visit to this world in which we now live. And it is not for any of us to choose the time for that single visit. This is of considerably more importance than would appear on first thought. Even the distant friend, visiting our own little Ann Arbor for just once in his life, would deem himself fortunate to have arrived yesterday at the annual homecoming — everything a riot of color and a wealth of welcome. He would have formed quite another impression, had he visited us about the first of September, when the place had all the marks of a deserted city.
“The same thing is true of our visit to this old planet — earth. It is of great consequence that one’s single, brief stay here should occur when there is something really doing, something important afoot….
“Of certain generations in the Christian era, very little is preserved. Indeed, there are certain cloudy strips of time, about midway of civilization’s journey from Golgotha to Verdun, so innocent of any real achievement that we really know nothing about men’s thoughts, deeds, or aspirations for periods of three or four generations laid end to end.
“Now, if I am to have only one life in this world, I am glad that I didn’t have to take my turn then.
“Until very recently, a considerable portion of the earth-dweller’s time and energy was occupied with the business of keeping alive and dealing with bodily discomforts. I am not an extremely old gentleman; yet, in the course of my life I have seen common life made more enjoyable. I remember very distinctly when the streets of Ft. Wayne, Indiana (which was the nearest large town) were lighted for the first time by electricity, and what an object of curiosity it was! In the town in which I lived then — a place of 2,000 population — a man drove around in a cart every evening and lighted a few oil-burning lamps. Most of the sidewalks were wooden, and the long planks had a trick of warping and becoming disconnected at one end, to the occasional undoing of pedestrians groping their way along the dimly lighted streets — streets that would mire a wagon almost any time in spring, and from which blinding clouds of dust arose all summer.
“I was ten when I saw a telephone for the first time, and several years older before I had occasion to use one. Such surgery as we had was very crude, and employed only as a last resort — and, if my memory serves me correctly, it generally proved to be, indeed, the last resort of the patient.
“I shall not forget the tremendous excitement that was caused when the first automobile appeared in town. It had only one cylinder and was in appearance like an old-fashioned buggy. The more discerning businessmen of the place agreed that it was an interesting toy, but assured one another that it would never be made practical. My own pet ambition as a little boy was to own some day one of those bicycles with a front wheel about five feet in diameter, trailed by a very small wheel less than a foot high. Altogether, it was a deadly weapon, but quite the thing with all the young men of the period. Practically the whole business of automatic machinery has come into being in the course of my own lifetime. I am thankful, today, that I have lived to see so many drudgeries of life rendered unnecessary.
“It is good to be living in a time when one does not have to spend quite so much of one’s nervous energy in the business of just keeping alive, and trying to cope with discomforts….
“Moreover, there are certain great issues before men’s minds today which serve to make this age of peculiar interest. The whole social order — the world ’round — is in a state of change. We know not what the next little group of years will bring forth, but we know that they will produce some radical revisions of our recent processes of living.
“There have been whole centuries when men grew up from boyhood to take over their father’s farm or shop or office and live precisely the manner of life that had been lived by their predecessors. Until very recently, the average American, speaking of his foreign-born neighbor, said, ‘He came from the Old Country.’ Which old country didn’t matter. All old countries looked alike — somewhere across the sea, they were.
“Now we have achieved an international consciousness — not an international conscience, as yet, but a recognition of the existence of other peoples and a growing desire to see them rid themselves of their old-world burdens of ignorance, disease, drudgery, and despair.
“True: the new knowledge has but added to our responsibilities and increased our obligations, but it is a great thing just to be alive in this period that shall be known in history as an era of radical changes more significant than any changes which have befallen human experience since the dawn of Christendom, nearly twenty centuries ago.
“I am thankful that, having but one life to live, I am permitted to be in the world now.”
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 