On Thanksgiving eve, many families start to gather, and often those that do have wonderful times together. Some do not.
To the end of promoting the former and not the latter, one dinner question should help: What is the most important book you have read other than Scripture from any tradition?
If you put this question near the beginning of a large family gathering, it will elicit some surprising titles (and should elicit some gratitude for the author, editor, and publisher who produced the book). It is also a window into whoever provides an answer.
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My program began on Tuesday with just this topic, and I listed five books for which I am grateful and which I recommend for parents to guide their junior high and high school students toward. They are all terrific reads, and while they can be rough in that the realities they describe are not known far and wide in America, each in its own way will elicit gratitude from anyone who reads them.
The first is simply the best single-volume textbook of “American History” on the market today: Land of Hope by Wilfred McClay. There is no guarantee that American students today will pass through the classroom of even one teacher gifted with a love of history, but you can give yourself and your family the common ground of a full, fair, and compelling-to-read account of how America got to 2025.
Armed with the unique American story, books that will illuminate how grand our story is are: Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Vladimir Bukovsky’s To Build A Castle: My Life As A Dissenter; Armando Valladares’s Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag; and Natan Sharansky’s and Ron Dermer’s The Case for Democracy.
This quartet of books drives a common message: There are many evil governments in the world that even today — long after the Enlightenment and long after the founding of our country and long after our own Civil War and our Constitution’s amendments and interpretive decisions that brought it to its present state of excellence — are horrific.
The world is not America, and we are uniquely blessed or lucky to live here and at this time. For this, we should be thankful.
There has never been a better time to be alive than now. There has never been a better place to be alive than here. But because we are not perfect and no government is perfect, there are plenty of things to improve and plenty of people who need improvement, including all of us.
This Thanksgiving, though, spare a thought for Jimmy Lai, a patriotic citizen of China who the totalitarian government has locked away in solitary confinement for years because he stood for democracy. Jimmy Lai is in poor health, in solitary confinement, and denied the sacraments of his Catholic faith. That General Secretary Xi Jinping has decreed this abuse of this single man tells you everything you need to know about Xi and about the Chinese Communist Party that Xi leads and which controls every aspect of every life in the People’s Republic of China.
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Like the dissidents listed above, Jimmy Lai will never not be admired for his courage and his rectitude. Lai is known to the world, but there are an untold number of political prisoners in similarly dire circumstances. Those who oppress Lai and all political prisoners will never not be known for doing so. And every American should toast every single one of our forebears who helped build this magnificent country in which every citizen enjoys the protection of the Constitution. We have no political prisoners in America. What a remarkable thing.
We all won history’s lottery. That’s the secret of Thanksgiving: We are all blessed to live in the United States. It is a good thing to remember that and a better thing to express it.
Hugh Hewitt is a longtime conservative commentator and author. He hosts the Hugh Hewitt Show on Salem Radio every weekday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.