EDITOR:

What would the world look like if each country suddenly came to the conclusion that the Golden Rule is to be followed? What if the United States chose to promote, “we here in America stand for the flag and kneel for the cross.”

These two suggestions would infuriate many. Left, Right, Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Hindu, Mormon…it doesn’t matter. We are all the same. There are no exceptions. We are all born with the same God-given hole in our heart. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why is it that there always seems to be something missing?

America today: Are we afraid to say Merry Christmas? When is the last time you heard someone say God Bless America? When the anthem is played, shouldn’t all stand and render thanks for the 1,250,000 lives lost for our freedom? Would it be best to thank a police officer and firefighter instead of voting to defund them? Have we lost sight of how “In God we trust” found its way onto our currency?

George Washington authorized the first Thanksgiving Day in 1789. Seventy-four years passed without another such day of thanks. Abraham Lincoln then established the holiday as an annual event in America. Given where our country now stands, it is worth listening to his Thanksgiving Proclamation again today. His speech has the answer to what is missing in every life.

“It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scripture and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the heavens.”

Mike Cousineau

Escananba