Milford chronicle., 1954-11-26
THANK GOD THIS THANKSGIVING
FOR OUR BLESSINGS

For the second time In two consecutive
Years, Thanksgiving is celebrated this year
~ an America at peace, an America in which
the daily lists of war casualties are blessedly
missing. That is cause alone for rejoicing.
The guns are stilled in Korea Families
gathered for the traditional THANKSGIVING
feast this year viii not have gnawing at their
hearts the familiar anxiety felt for hus-
bands and sons, fathers and brothers. absent
at some remote battlefront.
a peacetime Thanksgiving is one calling
for extraordinary feelings of gratitude to
Divine Providence. Our generation has
known too deeply the wOunding cares of war
not to rejoice, when it can, in a world even
supeFnclaIy at peace. In thanking God for
peace this year, we can add our prayers for
q peace that will endure, one that will keep
the guns still, that will keep the great bombs
chained up, that will keep. our families to-
gether.
Americans have so much to be thankful
for that there is danger of complacency, of
a smugness that accepts our good fortune
as something that is our rightful due and
mat cannot be taken away from us. The
1acts of history should throw needed cold
water upon self-satisfactiOn. We should new
er forget that what we have we can lose. We
have tremendous material advantages. The
abundance that. marks the Thanksgiving
Ieasts OF most americans symbOlizes the
good times IN which we live. Scant unem-
ployment; high standards of living these
are things for which we may properly be
thankful
But there Is more n THANKSGIVING than
the turkey dinner and good seats at a foot
pan game. The Pilgrims who instituted the
Ieast OF Thanksgiving I'M the early DAYS of
New England offered thanks not SO much
Tor their relative prosperity, or for the foods
under which their tables grOaned, but for the
grace granted them to survive the ordeaIs
through which they passed from want to
abundance. They had the God-given strength
TO face adyerslty and to overcome it. 1t is
their nardIhood that gave this Nation its
granite-like foundation
Softer generations have come to take
many OF our possessions for granted. In our
present-day Ihanksgivings there sometimes
appears TO be more taking" than giving"
we IKE what we have, but we don't bother to
Ieel particularly grateful for it. We tend to
forget, perhaps, our more important bless
lngs, the bedrock rights that the Nations
founders have bequeathed to us: the free
doms, for instance, of speech and worship
and assembly; the freedom to live and act
and die as an individual.
Because only the hungry can fully under
stand starvation, and only the prosecuted can
1ully appreciate place of worship freely
open 20 them, many Americans cannot know
how thankful they should be. 1t is necessary
to look around a bit and see what happens
where the elementary freedoms are lost and.
where the individual is treated as the face
less, sOulless property of the state. the party
on the ruling clique. Then, without any
snugness, but with humility, we should
thank God for our blessings.
ana, after attending to our thanks. It
would not hurt, in the spirit of the dav. to
do some giving" also. BY sharing with the
less fortunate, We can make it a more genu-
inc Thanksgiving.