Like every year, the University has carved out a short vacation — the Thanksgiving holiday — for students, starting Thursday. Most of us will get in a car or bus or train or plane and brave traffic (ground or air) for a four-day weekend to kick back, spend time with family or friends, feast upon the great autumnal cornucopia and (hopefully) not whittle away all of it doing homework.
But, wherever our long weekend takes us and however we choose to spend it, we shouldn’t forget that we all — regardless of backgrounds, creeds or political beliefs — have many common things to be thankful for.
Most readers of this editorial are likely college students, but that is by no means the norm. While more than half of American high school graduates enroll in colleges of some kind, only a small percentage of people worldwide enjoy the many potent benefits of participating in higher education. Though we might sometimes lament the drudgery of homework, midterms and finals, at the end of the day we should be thankful for the opportunity to extend our education because, after all, knowledge is power.
Likewise, we should appreciate the blessings of living in America. Not only do most Americans rarely worry about having enough to eat or how warm they’ll be at night, but we also enjoy more robust civil liberties than most people around the world and throughout history ever have. While being thankful for these benefits, however, we should at the same time remember that many people do not enjoy them — even in this nation, many will go hungry on Thanksgiving.
Reflection alone, however, will not spare these problems; accordingly, it is important to fight hunger, disease and poverty within our borders and abroad.
There are, on a lighter note, many other things for which we can give thanks this holiday season.
We should give thanks that the Ducks could remind Beaver fans of our school’s obvious superiority at this weekend’s Civil War game. We should give further thanks that the vast majority of attendees at the Civil War (but regrettably not all) chose not to dress up as one-man Dadaist art show Michael Jackson.
Also, we should appreciate having at least one day guaranteed to be free of Top Ramen lunches, Kraft dinners, and Go-gurt desserts.
And finally, not that anyone reading this will forget, we should all give thanks for the upcoming four days of vacation — or five days, if your rocking professors give you Wednesday off. We also give thanks that while we’re all presumptuously planning to do all our prep work for finals and big end-of-term projects, we obviously won’t.