When takers triumph, thankfulness wanes

Both Canada and the United States were built on Judeo Christian values. Specifically values of selflessness, humility, thinking of others as more important than themselves and deliberately and consistently attending to the needs of others.
It’s easy in a frontier country to have those values because life is hard for everyone. Without cooperation, no one survives.
Our first explorers, missionaries and traders most often survived in those early days because our aboriginal populations showed them how to survive in the harsh new world.
But affluence effectively takes away most of these charitable values, in particular to those we judge as not being worthy. There is little surprise that the influence of Judeo Christian values has little presence in today’s North America.
It was Thanksgiving this past Monday and it will be American Thanksgiving in November yet there appears to be little thankfulness in either country.
Mean-spiritedness and hardened attitudes towards others is alive and well.
In the window is glass and you can see others through it, but when we add just a little silver and turn it into a mirror, then all we can see is ourselves.
The United States and Canada have shed their Christian heritage to embrace liberalism—not Liberal, the political party—but liberalism which is grounded on the primacy of individuals, self-interest, limited government, low taxes and liberty.
Ironically the far right parties, who often capture the Christian vote, are the most ardent supporters of liberalism values.
Not every individual, but as a collective culture we have become slaves to money, pleasure, comforts and beauty. We are more concerned with outward appearance than developing a heart that displays kindness and generosity.
We are more concerned about accumulating wealth than who we are stepping on to acquire that wealth.
We are more concerned about maintaining our over-sized homes or our two homes and winters in Phoenix than homelessness. Yet homelessness is not only an economic issue, it’s a moral issue.
We become more concerned about being tough on crime, rather than tougher on the causes of crime. We are more concerned about sustaining our big incomes than protecting the environment which is under extreme stress and jeopardizing the very lives of millions of poor people worldwide.
For Canada to once again become a thankful country we will have to shed our selfishness and our mean spiritedness. Real thanksgiving is not about self but about others and the common good.
Real love costs the giver something. Too many citizens in wealthy countries, including Canada, are most concerned about taking not giving.
Just listen to conversations around the dinner table. It’s usually about our lifestyle being threatened rather than concern for the millions of people, often women and children, in a war zone fleeing for their lives, or the mentally ill on our streets, or third-world living conditions for many of our First Nations communities.
The fact that over 35 per cent of Americans and many Canadians admire one of the most deplorable takers of all time, Donald Trump, it is not surprising to those who are students of history that many first-world democracies are in a season of chaos. A season that always comes when eyes are turned solely on self.