Thoughts for Thanksgiving
At this time of year it is appropriate for us to recall how fortunate we really are. My grandparents, escaping Tsarist pogroms of the early 20th century, walked over 1,300 miles with barely the clothes on their backs to get from Russia to the coast of France so they could come to America. Their struggle for freedom was just one in a tableau of 19th and 20th Century struggles to achieve the freedoms we take so much for granted.
As we sit down this Thanksgiving with family and friends and partake of the incredible bounty before us, I urge each of you to stop for a minute to think about all those here in the USA and around the world who will have no dinner, who may be languishing in makeshift refugee camps… especially the children whose die is cast for them not by them. As “good” people we have been given the opportunity to take action… to commit ourselves to making the world a better place, day by day and child by child.
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by bad people but the silence over that by the good people. Martin Luther King, Jr.