Happy Thanksgiving

I was reading Andy Rooney the other day and saw something that seemed very appropriate given the time of year. It was passage about the president's personal life, and how there must be times he just needs to sit back and call a friend just to shoot the breeze. Andy Rooney wrote, "I often have a guilty feeling going past a hospital. I know how many sick and dying people there are in those rooms and yet how long can any one of us feel sad about everyone in trouble in the world? We have to shut out the thought of some of what we know in going on and proceed with our lives."

Wow. Think about that. The president is a man with the entire world on his shoulders. He has a front row seat to all of the death, destruction, homelessness, poverty, abuse, neglect, injustice, genocide, rape, and every other kind of horrible thing imaginable and unimaginable. And he is the man forced to claim that one life is more important than another, that a story about an assassinated dignitary is more important than a boy whose parents beat him to death for spilling his food. He must put the thought of that little boy to the side. That's gotta be a bitch.

I am the kind of person who reads a story of a person that was hurt, or abused and it affects me. It doesn't matter when or where it happens, these stories will affect me. Soon I will put them in the back of my mind, and there are days I hate myself for it.

But we can't think about it all the time. When we hear a story like that, we can't dwell on it, or we'll never be able to function. We can't constantly remember the people who don't have food. We can't take on the weight of the world. We have to shut it out, even though we can see the pain going on around us.

And we cry, we scream, we want to throw something. We do that because we cannot save them. But there are times we have to stop, so the little girl sitting at the kitchen table doesn't have ask why daddy is crying, and doesn't have to concern herself with the problems of the world. So you can delay the inevitable and irrevocable fact, that she will be thrust into a world with people who hurt, and maim, and rape, and kill. And you keep her away from it because she is happy, and you need her to be happy, because then at least one more person will be. She has a roof over her head, clean clothes, plenty of food. She'll even get presents for Christmas. While others will get nothing but pain, and if they're lucky, the ability to wake up another day and hope it may get better.

Be happy that you can push these kinds of thoughts to the side and thought you can never forget them, you don't dwell on them. Give thanks for what you have, but more than anything, give thanks you have the ability to direct your thoughts to something other than the problems of the world, even if it's just for a minute to call up grandma and tell her you love her, or to read a little Andy Rooney.