Thanksgiving

Whiskey makes me reflective.  So it is with two ounces of reflection to consume I turn to Thanksgiving.

Many societies have a Thanksgiving or Harvest Festival.  It seems it is part of the human condition, no matter if you’re in Korea with Chuseok, Nigeria and Argungu Fishing Festival or America and our Thanksgiving.  It is a period to celebrate your success in gathering enough to survive the hard days ahead.

But there is another dimension to the holiday.  I just finished ‘Moscow Rules,’ an overview history of the CIA attempts to gather intelligence in Moscow during the Cold War and up to Mr. Putin.  It talks about successes and failures and the operational rules they developed.  But the between-the-lines story is the poverty, paranoia, fear and unhappiness that pervade Russian society.

Imagine always being under observation.

If you think you have it bad, imagine a society in which you could be reported to the secret police because some stranger asks you where the bus line is.

Since the founding of the American civilization somebody has ensured we have enough, that we have options available, that we have a system of laws (no matter how clumsy) that help define our open society.  Those somebodies have to be us.  We are the soldier, the doctor, the fireman, the person on jury duty, the farmer, the taxpayer, the person who picks up the junk some idiot left in the park.

We need to be the person who dimes out the dealer selling poison to someone else’s child, the person who says something to the authorities about the underage girls on the street corner, the person who accepts the burden of civic virtue.

Not everyone does can or will do this.  The ratio of doers to non-doers will determine what kind of country, what kind of society we will have tomorrow and the day after that.

We should be thankful for these people.  I know I am.

Happy Thanksgiving!