Location, location, location: Thanksgiving 2009
All in all, life’s not too bad.
Well, it is, for millions of people but here, in the West, we already won quite a handful of prizes in the kind of lottery that does give God(s) a pretty bad name:
All of us who made it here didn’t have mothers who died from complications stemming from clitoridectomy and/or infibulation or who were stoned to death for looking at (let alone sleeping with) the wrong guy.
Our mothers didn’t suffer from the kind of malnutrition that makes it impossible to conceive or carry a baby to full term…
… and we, before we were born, weren’t aborted because we were girls…
… and, when born, we didn’t almost immediately die from any number of perfectly preventable diseases, or from hunger, or from polluted water, or from ‘precision’ bombardments…
… and we weren’t shot or maimed because we were girls who wanted to go to school, or blown up in school buses because we were Jewish, or shot dead for throwing stones at heavily armoured soldiers.
On the whole, most of us who were born in the West have been luckier than billions of others - now and during any other time in history. Not because we are more deserving than our fellow human beings but because we weren’t born in any of the way too many Hell holes that did and do and will, most probably, always exist on planet earth.
(Thinking of that doesn’t make me turn to any God: All I can picture here really is some smart-dressed, smart-arse TV presenter, smiling like Satan and shouting, “YES! It all really IS about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION…!!!”)
Anyway, I know that not everybody in the West has an easy ride. Hell, Hell, ask the Fort Hood victims and their family members. Ask any parents whose young children, one day, simply disappeared. Ask the families of those who died in drive-by shootings. Ask the women who were raped (and then raped again by the criminal justice system.) Ask the children of addicts and sexual abusers. Ask the parents of the children who are bullied or ended up on death row…
Wherever you will have human beings you will find these man-made Hells and horror stories. We are truly and fundamentally flawed…
… and yet, I do think that most of us, here in the West, complain much too much – and you don’t need to be religious to understand that it truly is a sin not to count your blessings.
You wouldn’t think so though, if you listened to the endless moaning, the petty jealousies and shallow cravings of people who have homes and families, who have food and clean running water and central heating; whose fridges and local supermarkets are filled with the kind of riches the vast majority of people will never be able to afford or even imagine.
In Europe, we don’t have Thanksgiving Day. Today, in North America, it’s about midway between Canada’s TD, which fell on the 12th of October, and TD in the US, which will be on the 26th of this month.
Still, let’s try and be a bit more thankful for all the things that we in the West so casually, and often so gracelessly, enjoy – and let’s all at least try and remember to do this a bit more often than once a bloody year, perhaps.
(End of sermon)
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