A Stolen Thanksgiving Soap Box Speech
I’m pirating this from my favorite book The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn (it’s on pages 62-63)…she pirated this from a man by the name of Charlie Woodward who is a lay preacher and an expert on rural poverty. I hope this one entry alone shows why I dearly love this book…
…A gift is anything that we have that we did not work for. People born to wealth have more advantages than those born in poverty. People with a high intelligence will probably fare better than those born with low intelligence. It is known that people who are blond, tall, and good-looking will be more likely to succeed than those who are not.
Most of us feel that being born in the United States is a gift. While not all of us are rich, we are likely to have greater opportunities for education, health care, and employment than those living in Third World countries.
Health is a gift, at least the health with which we were born. Most of us are botching it to some degree or another. But our genetic package plays a large role in why some can abuse their health and never get sick while others work at being healthy and still get sick.
Those of us who were raised in good families have a gift. Not everyone was raised with love, security, positive feedback and values. Charlie belives that the ‘work ethic’ is also a gift. Some parents taught it to their kids and some parents did not.
Many examples come to mind of individuals who have overcome a lack of gifts. These people always have a variety of other gifts.
The bottom line is to understand that what we have and who we are has a lot to do with factors we received in a package deal when we came into the world. If that realization doesn’t make you thankful, nothing will.
I believe we need to use all our gifts as well as we can to provide security and quality of life for our families. Most of us do this well enough to have a surplus of either time or money.
Clearly some people are short on gifts and some have gifts and do not use them well. For both groups their security and quality of life runs a deficit. All the grumbling about those who receive public assistance is really about deciding into which group people fall. The questions I have asked have only yielded the knowledge that experts do not agree and there are many murky grey areas.
But what of the rest of us whose gifts (and usually some effort) have yielded a surplus? It is easy to find people who have surpluses…most of us do. And most of us squander huge amounts of surplus money or time on personal gratification and give very little or nothing in return.
The attitude of “I worked hard and I deserve…” does not consider the very large degree that our gifts contributed to what we have.
The frugal lifestyle allows us to engineer the maximum surplus of time, energy, and/or money while using a minimum of resources. Since we are gifted differently, our surplus will also be different. We can, and should, use our surpluses to help smooth the peaks and valleys of unequal gift distribution.
Clearly I do not advocate squandering of resources, but neither do I advocate hoarding or stinginess.
By donating some of our surplus time, energy, and money we express thankfulness for the abundance of gifts with which we were born.
