Wednesday.....Culture.....Fourth Thursday of November

         The economy may totally collapse, war looms in the Middle East, the church cannot get enough latte cafes, scoundrels and scalawags abound in Congress and corporate America, Hillary Clinton is in the news more than ever, but in our home tonight it was time for ROCK AND ROLL TRIVIOLOGIES, the game for the seriously confused as to what is important in life. Our son and his fiancee are home from their respective colleges. We had a nice dinner followed by a game. Now my wife is ultra competitive, probably because she is good at many things. Ping Pong is probably the worst.....no, no.....500....no, its tennis! My future daughter-in-law, a top student in high school and college, seems to be very competitive as is our son. Then there am I, the self-proclaimed I like it when the other guy wins type of guy.....except in Trivia. After a couple of hours (my wife and I versus our son and and his fiancee) we were tied. Such is the nature of this game that it can take a while. We tried two forms of overtime sudden death with no winner. Then the question came that could win it all for us, Q: The Philadelphia born 1950's and 60's teen idol appeared frequently on American Bandstand, and co-starred in the film Bye Bye Birdie with..... my hands flew up in the air "Bobby Rydell...Yes!", with Ann-Margaret and Dick Van Dyke.
          Americans like to win! We like to win wars, Olympics, to be first to the moon. We want to see who wins Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, who loses the most weight. We often lose the capacity to enjoy a very good season if it does not culminate in a Super Bowl or Stanley Cup. On the other hand our education scores are probably 137th in the world behind Lower Slobodia and it doesn't seem to bother us. Is their a correlation here? This particular characteristic, the desire to be first, may have begun germinating in us on October 5th 1957 when the Soviet Union announced that it had beaten us to space and then again on April 12th, 1961 when they announced that it had sent a man into space first. Alan Shepard was in space a month later and we haven't stopped this quest for the gold since. In February 1964 Cassius Clay predicted, in a rhyme of course, that he would launch the heavyweight champion of the world, Sonny Liston, into space. Joe Namath, in 1969, grabbed the attention of Americans by boldly proclaiming We're going to win this game. I guarantee it! Both of these successful predictions were huge upsets.
         We had found our destiny in the 1960s, and the narcissistic 70s followed. It's kind of ironic that the Wall Street Journal (a newspaper built on seeking success) began a tradition in 1961 that continues to this, the day before Thanksgiving, publishing a chronicle of the Plymouth Colony in 1602 from the pen of William Bradford, it begins: So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city and therein quieted their spirits.
         Thanksgiving is the only holiday to me. Christmas and Easter have departed from their scriptural origins and the 4th of July, wonderful though it is in its meaning, has long since lost its savor. These pilgrims offered the first thanksgiving to Almighty God. The new congress and George Washington recommended a day of thanksgiving and Abraham Lincoln initiated the last Thursday of November as the day to be put aside. More than any other individual day of the year, I can meditate on the temporal blessings that have been given to America. I can look at these courageous pilgrims and desire to have even a morsel of their determination. It is a day of pure thankfulness, and I am thankful for it!