When it comes to holidays, I’ve always preferred Thanksgiving to Christmas.
When Thanksgiving Day rolls around, I don’t feel pressured to rush to the malls and spend money I don’t have on presents that people really don’t need. Instead, I get together with family to eat a lot of good food, watch a football game or two on TV and simply enjoy the day.
Thanksgiving is an occasion dating back to the earliest days of the European settlement of America, and it reminds us of a time when we thought it important to work together, for the common good of all. The religious separatists known as the Pilgrims gave us the tradition of a Thanksgiving observance not long after they landed in Massachusetts Bay in November 1620.
The Pilgrims gave us something else as well—an extraordinary document called the Mayflower Compact that, for the first time, set down a written framework for the establishment of a governing body in what became the United States. The 41 men who signed the compact agreed to abide by the rules that would be formulated by the new government of the Plymouth colony. The document was based upon the momentous idea that we set up governments to do things as a group that we would not be able to do individually. The signers promised that to ensure “our better ordering and preservation,” they would enact ”just and equal Laws” that were considered to be “most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony.”
The words of the Mayflower Compact echo throughout the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. The agreement signed by a few dozen settlers in a tiny New England colony provided the foundation for a governing system that still serves us today.
There has always been a tension in this country between individualists who criticize any form of government activity and those who recognize that a large, complex society such as ours can only function if it is managed through some form of governmental arrangement.
Similarly, we have long heard the arguments of libertarians and others who insist that governments can do nothing right and that we should wait for the wonders of the free market to solve whatever problems might confront us—as they put it, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
I would argue that there are things governments can do quite well. When America joined with its allies to defeat the forces of Nazism and fascism in World War II, it was able to do so because President Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized the federal government on an unprecedented scale to hurl back those threats to democracy.
It was the federal government under President Dwight Eisenhower that conceived and launched the interstate highway system that links our states and makes access by automobile feasible to virtually every corner of this country.
The efforts of the federal government under presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon put a man on the moon. That’s something no other country has done to this day, and it is something that our government accomplished just eight years after Kennedy first called for it.
Even the internet, a technology that has transformed the world in ways that are still unfolding, started out as a government project: a computer network designed for the Department of Defense so that the agency could communicate with scientists and professors.
Those original Pilgrims knew nothing about computer networks, of course, when they signed their primitive compact. They were just trying to survive a brutal winter season in an unforgiving land. They knew that their survival depended upon everyone’s willingness to work together for the common good. We seem to have lost that communal spirit in today’s hostile political environment, but I hope someday we can regain it.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
