Thanksgiving

I recently had a discussion with a young Marxist.  Well, at least I think that’s what he was.  I mean, his arguments were too incoherent to really draw any conclusions, but he seemed to be arguing for anarcho-communism, and he left me utterly speechless by espousing the labor theory of value.  Seriously, I thought that had been so utterly discredited that no one could possibly still buy into it.

We talked for a couple hours, but my biggest takeaway from the conversation was that the greatest difference was ingratitude.  Here we are, living in a time that was unimaginable at the start of my own short lifetime, and all he can do is complain about what’s wrong with the world.

It brought to mind a line I’d committed to memory that has been attributed to persons from GK Chesterton to JBS Haldane.  I personally originally heard it attributed to Abraham Herschel.  Anyway, it goes like this:  “The world is perishing, not from lack of wonders, but from lack of wonder.”

Or to borrow a rather longer, but much funnier observation from one of my all-time favorite authors, Jim Butcher:

 

“Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.

The drinks, people.

I read it for the philosophy.  Seriously.

So this young Marxist is complaining that capitalism is evil because 700,000,000 people live in abject poverty.  Pointing out that within less than half my lifetime (admittedly 75% of his), that number has plummeted from over 1,500,000,000, he continues to concentrate on the inequalities and insists any gains are attributable to changing the methodology.

So I change to a more tangible metric:  food.  I point out that fewer people are starving today, because of GMO’s and other aspects of Borlaug's Green Revolution have raised food production to 2,500 Calories per person per day for the entire population, and that the only thing standing in the way of world-wide feeding--nay, obesity--is the corrupt governments of the producer nations (yeah, that’d be US) trying to force the “backward” countries to comply through economic embargoes and the corrupt governments of the “backward” countries sending all the food that does get in straight to their armies.  I observed that such a thing was unimaginable when he was born.  He insisted that it has always existed.

Not so much.

The conversation bugged me, because I couldn’t put my finger on exactly where the two of us deviated.  We both shared a disdain for cronyism, corporate welfare, law enforcement abuses, and many other problems of our modern America.  But why do I view the world with hope, and he with bleak fatalism?

A few days later, I was headed home.  Needing to fill up with gas and wanting to take advantage of our loyalty card, I pulled out my smartphone, Googled “Kickback card Sidney MT,” and was given the location of the Town Pump.  I fueled up Patty, then decided to get myself something, too.  When I walked in, I blinked at the size of the coffee section.  One dispenser dispensed 6 different coffees.  A second dispensed 5 chocolate or coffee drinks.  A dozen or more drip coffee dispensers sat next to them.  There was even another machine that dispensed 4 different sweeteners.  I paced off the counter:  it’s over fifteen feet long!  Over twenty drinks before you even start mixing things (I had a mocha spiked with about a shot of high-caffeine drip).  Then I grabbed an apple fritter.  It was amazing.

As I sat eating the fritter, it then occurred to me that it was taking me longer to eat it than it took me to earn the $0.89 it cost.  When, in all of recorded human history, has it ever taken an average person more time to eat a luxury food item than to buy it?

And that’s when it hit me, that the difference between me and the Marxist was a sense of wonder and gratitude. 

And maybe part of it is age and a rural upbringing.  I lived in the pre-internet age.  Shoot, I still remember rotary phone service!  I vaguely remember the tail-end of news coverage of the Ethiopian Famine. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But it can't be just that, because people a couple times my age recently elected an economically illiterate authoritarian because he promised to "Make America Great Again."  

Really?  By what metric?  Do we want microwaves to cost $14,000 (inflation-adjusted), minorities to not be able to share water fountains, the everpresent fear of a nuclear holocaust, or childhood leukemia to have a sub-20% survival rate instead of the inverse we enjoy today?

Which just goes to show that ingratitude is rampant on both sides of the political aisle.

In the end, gratitude and wonder are not something that certain people or cultures have, and others do not.  It is a discipline each individual must practice every day.  I, Pencil is a good place to start.

So I could sit here today depressed by working on Thanksgiving, 2.5 hours away from my family, and going home to this:

 

 

Or, I can look at this and thank God for the ability to safely store tasty,* nutritious** food at room temperature.  I can consider the number of people who have died over the millennia from a lack of this ability, and tip my hat to the people who have ensured that this little bit of seasonality on an otherwise dreary day will not leave me retching my guts out tomorrow***.

So here’s to Monsanto, Norman Borlaug, Nicolas Appert, and Louis Pasteur.  Here’s to the farmers who grew it, the inventor of the robotic lines that cooked and packaged it up, the workers who keep them running, the truckers who dropped it off, the stockboy who shelved it, and the store clerk that rang me up.

And here’s to Brennan Manning, Remy, Donald Miller, Andrew Heaton, Ronald Bailey, Leonard Read, Mike Rowe, and a hundred others who have helped me see what a wonderful world we have.

 

 

*relatively, I mean, it is a Hormel product

**relatively, I mean, it is a Hormel product

***hopefully, I mean, it is a Hormel product