An Urban's Rural View

Thanksgiving commentary tends to the repetitive. Year after year the pundits rehash the same themes: turkey, football, Pilgrims, parades, things to be thankful for. Every now and then the pundits stumble on a new theme -- in recent years it's retailers' unrelenting efforts to commercialize the holiday -- but before long the new theme becomes just another rut for the commentators to grind their wheels deeper into.

For sheer predictable Thanksgiving repetitiousness, however, no one outdoes The Wall Street Journal. Every year since 1961 the newspaper has published the same two editorials (http://tiny.cc/…) on the day before Thanksgiving -- editorials that seems remarkably fresh despite the word-for-word duplication.

The first, headlined "The Desolate Wilderness," is an extended quotation from a first-hand account of the winter of 1620 in Massachusetts, when the newly-arrived Pilgrims "had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour," and they saw only "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men."

The second, "And the Fair Land," assesses the condition of the country and finds reasons for both optimism and unease. What's remarkable about these reasons is their timelessness. If you didn't know that it was written in 1961, you could easily think the editorial was talking about today.

The U.S., in this 1961 view, is "a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure." And it has the potential to be bigger and richer still, for America is "one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped."

Still true today.

But Americans, the editorial continues, "cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure." Alas "their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe."

Eerie. It could have been written yesterday.

At home, the Americans of 1961 saw "young arrayed against old, black against white, neighbor against neighbor, so that they stand in peril of social discord." So do we.

Today, as then, we may well ask how Americans can "not despair when they see that the cities and countryside are in need of repair, yet find themselves threatened by scarcities of the resources that sustain their way of life."

And though we often think today's politicians are uniquely pathetic, the 52-year-old editorial laments that Americans "turn for leadership to men in high places -- only to find those men as frail as any others."

How, the editorial wonders -- as we do -- can Americans "pass on to their children a nation as strong and free as the one they inherited from their forefathers? How is their country to endure these cruel storms that beset it from without and from within?"

In the end, "And the Fair Land" urges solace in something that's still true: "We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators."

And it urges solace also in something that worldwide opinion polls today might dispute, but immigration statistics support: "Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth."

Finally, harking back to "The Desolate Wilderness," the second editorial concludes by noting that if the Pilgrims "had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land."

Repetition is usually boring. But to be given, on this most traditional of American holidays, the opportunity to put our problems in perspective, to see the connectedness of those problems to those our parents and grandparents faced, is something to be thankful for indeed.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES)

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