Thanksgiving in the Press

Our local newspaper often prints excepts from its editions of the past. Thursday on Thanksgiving it ran this from 1959: “A grateful South Plains today pauses to give thanks for bumper crops, prospering economy – and the freedom of worship in the world’s strongest nation.” In the paper’s Thanksgiving week editions of 2009, it gave us a hectoring sermonette about “healthy holiday eating” and a front page sob story about a cocaine-ruined homeless man, told with the fairly clear implication that those sitting comfortably at home roasting turkeys were somehow to blame for his plight. In neither case was the newspaper doing anything unusual or original. Then and now, it was following the conventions of the time. However, this illustrates how far the popular journalistic culture has come in only fifty years.

In 1959 Thanksgiving was seen mainly as time for a productive and happy people to celebrate and be grateful for the bounty of the land and the life they enjoyed. In 2009 it is seen mainly as an occasion for moralistic carping and inducing guilt. There are obvious reasons for this. In recent decades the culture and the cult of victimization and the connected notion that only victims are worthy of attention or concern have become the commonplace. In addition the press has become more politicized, and the current fashion has its political uses. People who feel guilty and are embarrassed or uncertain about their way of life are easier to rule. People who value their freedom, success, and well-earned prosperity are harder to boss around.

There is also a less obvious reason for the shifting focus to a somewhat morbid preoccupation with the failed and unsuccessful and away from any interest in or appreciation of the attitudes, conditions, and mechanisms involved in the creation and maintenance of our way of life. For many people today, good harvests, general prosperity, and freedom are taken for granted as though they were basic, invariant conditions of existence needing no thought or notice and requiring no effort or attention to sustain. That of course is absurd. Poverty and servitude are the historical norms. Times where the common people are free and prosperous are quite rare in history and dependent on fairly specific requisites. To ignore that or to fail to teach it to the members of each new generation is dangerous and recklessly risky. Yet that is precisely what those in the traditional media are doing today.