List #44: Daredevil Nation

Give thanks to the Lord.

From our family to yours, we wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. We’re supremely grateful for all of you. We’ll be taking the week of 11/25-29 off and looking forward to resuming the conversation after the holiday.

Next week we mark a holiday from deep in our ancestral past, remembering when the Pilgrims forged an uneasy truce with the Indian tribes who welcomed them to their new home. It’s a day of gratitude not just for small comforts but for near-run things and hard-won life, for the divine favor that has brought our scrappy people—improbably, tenaciously, miraculously—through every kind of brush with death.

Governor William Bradford of Plymouth recalled that when the Pilgrims at last made landfall, “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries of it, again to set their feet upon the firm and stable earth.”

Pretty much our whole history has been like that. It must be true that “a special providence protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.” How else could such a daredevil nation have bobbed and weaved as we did, through famine, fire, and revolution, to emerge astride the world? For all our sins, and there are plenty, the good Lord has seen fit to bless and preserve us. So we give thanks.