Perhaps it’s because spring has arrived or maybe that we marked another birthday for the world’s most beautiful woman, but it just seems right to write another column on gratitude. Yes, some research (discussed below) indicates gratitude is good for your health and whatnot, but sometimes it’s just the simple fact that gratitude grants perspective.
Judging by what my fellow columnists in this real estate persistently recycle or sometimes write themselves, what these times call for if anything is perspective. By perspective, I mean: “A true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion.” Yet it’s common to read in these pages writers local and national attempting to gin up outrage and fear over this, that and t’other. If it’s not lynchings and Jim Crow, it’s catastrophic climate change and the current President’s racism, hair, ignorance, narcissism and skin tone.
Perspective, gentlemen! Why, just last week another columnist asserted in the online comment section of this fishwrap that progress in U.S. racial relations wasn’t important because of the aforementioned crimes against black people so long ago Sherman and Mr. Peabody would have difficulty finding them in the Wayback Machine. Somehow, the false equivalency goes, the racism of 100 years ago is proportional to today.
Pointing that out unleashed a torrent of attacks that included the bizarre assertion that any white person who didn’t vote for Barack Obama was a de facto racist. One fact ignored was the very real anti-Semitism running rampant in portions of the black community — and bubbling beneath the surface of scathingly negative comments directed at prominent Jewish Never-Trumpers Jonah Goldberg and William Kristol.
As David Horowitz noted, the issue presented by the left is seldom the issue. The real issue is the revolution and everything else but a distraction. What revolution, you ask? The revolution that some on the left believe will yield a one-government Ultron of utopian bliss when all power is designated for the proper people. Advanced degrees and a key to the faculty outhouse required, doncha know.
Of course, Ultron didn’t work out well for Tony Stark, did it? Life is messier than that — and utopian schemes always prompt unforeseen consequences when implemented. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that — and even after the Avengers defeated Ultron, Stark continued to insist he was still correct. Ahhh, hubris!
Saving the planet is an exclusive club of superior-minded intellects while the rest of us can all pound sand under the boot of one totalitarian government or another. Give me your tired, your poor and all your firearms with one hand, and a receipt for your children with the other.
Racism, climate change — name your poison, are deployed as issues so urgent all other considerations are secondary. Pull back the curtain of urgency, however, and there’s a whole lotta statists standing there exercising their respective Nietzschean will to power utilizing Saul Alinsky tactics and Marxist dialectics. Golly, who wants to wind up on the “wrong side of history” and who cannot resist the allure of a politician who claimed his election “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?
Seventh in a list of the benefits of gratitude published by Forbes in 2014 is this: “A 2003 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that gratitude was a major contributor to resilience following the terrorist attacks on September 11. Recognizing all you have to be thankful for — even during the worst times of your life — fosters resilience.”
Resilience means to roll with the punches. A healthy shot of perspective with a gratitude chaser helps as well.
Bruce Edward Walker (walker.editorial@gmail.com) is a Morning Sun columnist, contributor to The Federalist, creative-writing instructor, freelance writer, and host of the Acton Institute’s “Upstream” contemporary-culture podcast.