"To Say Nothing But Thank You"

We're being governed by ingrates, but gratitude can empower us to take them down...

I. As I listen to America’s corrupt and incompetent misleaders lie about the damage they’re doing to our nation and the world—then try to cover their lies with smirks, sneers and chest-beating threats against those who oppose them—it strikes me that we’re being trashed by people with souls so dead that they’re incapable of gratitude.

These world-wreckers are the poster boys and girls for America’s pernicious myth of the “self-made” man or woman. They live under the illusion that their privilege, position, wealth, and power has come to them through their own efforts and merits, and is theirs alone to profit from with no regard for the common good. Why say “thank you” when you did it all yourself?

Put power in the hands of people like that, as we have so tragically done, and they join the ranks of the world’s most dangerous people. Owing no debt of gratitude to anyone or anything, they wield their power solely for the sake of personal gain, indifferent to the rubble they leave in their wake.

II. My parents worked hard for what they had, but they never forgot the help they needed along the way. They taught me that no one makes it on their own, that it’s imperative to give thanks for gifts received and pay it forward to those in need. Eventually I learned that this “gift economy” is key to saving us from lives of sink or swim. Who among us would still have our heads above water if others had not buoyed us up? Certainly not I.

Now, at age 87, a new frontier of gratitude has opened for me, and Jeanne Lohmann names it perfectly: I’m grateful for blessings so small they escaped my attention when I was young. As I write these words at 6:00 AM on a mid-March day, I’m saying “thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring / and to the cold wind of its changes,” for the promise of deliverance from a hard-frozen winter, for the smell of the coffee I just brewed while looking for the first hint of dawn, for the fact that I was able to get up this morning and look forward to another day of life.

When you’re in your eighties and looking more closely at your own death, you don’t take even the smallest blessing for granted—unless you are POTUS. Nothing can evoke gratitude in this miserable excuse for a man, not even Americans who lost their lives because he sent them to war. He will soon be 80, and yet he wore a self-promoting MAGA baseball cap to a solemn ceremony that brought home the remains of six U.S. soldiers killed in his war on Iran. This is the same ingrate-in-chief who referred to soldiers who died in WWII as “suckers” and “losers.”

III. When deluded people get political power, they use it to delude more and more people, a dark art known as “securing the base.” For politicians who feel entitled to their own success—who lack regard for the common good—there is no such thing as systemic economic injustice that keeps some locked into a state of near-poverty. Our misleaders regard the victims of predatory capitalism as “lazy losers who should get to work, just like we did.”

For decades, entitled politicians have been telling people mired in generational poverty to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even though they are too poor to buy boots. No wonder the wealth gap in the U.S. has grown exponentially with ingrates at the helm.

A cartoonist’s take on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 (R) campaign for the presidency. Goldwater inherited a family-owned department store.

As one who is acutely aware of all the support I needed to find my way, I cannot understand why so many Americans have bought into the lie that “people on welfare” who are “sponging off the taxes paid by those of us who work hard” are the root cause our economic woes. The fact that MAGA voters can’t see that the entitled rich, not the poor, are the leading cause of the American wealth gap leads me to wonder if they, too, are ingrates, oblivious to the fact that even they depend on support from other people.

IV. Rightly understood, gratitude goes well beyond giving thanks. It’s a wellspring of motivation that can empower us to work for love, truth and justice. The deeper our gratitude for something or someone, the more we value it, and the more time and energy we will devote to protecting it.

No one wrote more compellingly about the link between gratitude and social change than the late Joanna Macy, the environmental activist whose work on “despair and empowerment” has been so influential in the campaign to mitigate the planetary crises of our time.

As Matthew Fox has written, Macy saw gratitude as “a stance of the soul, a revolutionary, grounding, and subversive act that is independent of external circumstances. It is a ‘primal wow’ of being alive that counters the consumerist message of insufficiency. Gratitude helps individuals feel sufficient, fostering the strength to face the world’s pain and engage in [what she called] the ‘Great Turning.’ … I often cite her teaching that ‘when your heart breaks, the whole universe can pour through.’ She urged us to put our energy into gratitude, face hurt head on, and remain creative and fight the good fight.”

V. With a MAGA-sponsored “war of choice” raging in the Middle East—while civility, community, sanity, security and the Main Street economy continue to crumble here at home—we are in desperate need of a Great Turning. So as we approach the next No Kings Day on Mar. 28, and deepen our focus on the Nov. 3 Midterm General Election, let’s name what we are grateful for and commit to fighting for it.

My list of gratitudes is too long to enumerate here, but these items are on it: • Communities of kindness, generosity and mutual aid. • People who know how to hold their differences with appreciation and creativity. • Political leaders who are committed to the common good • Citizens who take their role seriously. • The ancestors who never gave up on trying to bring our democracy closer to its ideals.

If you feel so inclined, please make your own list, and ask yourself every day if you’ve done something to advance at least one of the things you’re grateful for. We’ll all be grateful that you did!

P.S. Among the many things I’m grateful for are your kind and generous comments during my Feb. 27 online birthday party. Thank you so much for words that encourage and sustain me in more ways than I can say. A deep bow of gratitude to all…

NOTES: Jeanne Lohmann’s books are HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post. My 10 books are HERE at Bookshop.org and HERE at Barnes & Noble. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE.