Give Thanks

This Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks for…

I was on a train when I learned what it meant to Give Thanks. 

I was 21, just out of school, and traveling through the forgotten part of Europe on $25 a day - the beaten-down eastern countries that had been bullied into poverty and silence by the old Soviet Union.

I’d visited a communist beach resort - imagine if the TSA ran your local mini-golf - and was heading back to the big city. I was sharing one of those little six-seat train compartments with a cheerful 23-year-old primary school teacher from Russia. 

I’d only been in Eastern Europe for a week and this was my first time chatting with a real, live Russian.  Of course I’d learned all about Russians in college, how they hated America, and were our enemy.  And I’d seen enough films about Russians — Rocky fighting the Russians, Red Dawn where the Wolverines fight the Russians, and Red October where Sean Connery was a Russian himself, and yet he, too, fought the Russians — to know they were wily and crafty and not to be trusted.

But here I was with a clever, educated Russian and hours to chat as the beautiful countryside flowed by our window, disturbed only by the occasional, monumentally ugly factories the Soviets liked to dump in the middle of God's own creation. We swapped stories and questions - she in her broken English, me drawing pictures in the back of my Let’s Go travel guide.

It was electrifying.  We just didn’t know a lot about how the other was brought up, what they ate, what they thought, what they were taught. But we’d been raised to be afraid of each other.

She was from a mid-sized city by a river and loved teaching little kids.  She didn’t have a lot of stories about new things or new technologies in her life, because they didn’t get new things.  And the old things they got were poorly made and falling apart.  But the Russians did value education and learning, and she was well-read. As it is everywhere, family was most important, and despite whatever limits her country had, that’s what she’d relied on.

The whole conversation, which would have been illegal a few years before, had that excitement that happens when kids from different places get together anywhere in the world.  I still have the guidebook with my handwritten notes, and we apparently discussed Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, prime numbers, and the jobs we’d each worked to pay expenses through college.

The hours passed, the fields rolled by, and the ugly factory shadows grew longer and longer.  It was amazing to be talking to the old enemy, who didn’t seem like such an enemy, and in fact seemed like all the other twentysomethings I knew, except for being from Russia.  

Since we’d both started to let our guard down, I got curious. I wondered how someone so sensible could have believed all that Soviet nonsense, and the idiots who had been pushing it on them.  I didn’t want to be rude to my new friend, though, so I thought of a roundabout way of asking her who she thought the greatest person in history was. Then I could argue that Marx or Lenin or Stalin was actually a really bad guy, and how none of them were as great as the Russian propaganda had made them seem.

And then she answered me. The greatest person in history was…

“Ronald Reagan. Because he set us free.”

If there are moments in life that change you, this changed me. 

Whether I’d been fortunate or privileged or lucky or blessed, I don’t believe I had ever truly appreciated it until that moment.

I realized that I’d been wrong.  And I’d been wrong not only about them.  But also about us.

It’s not just that her answer was unexpected, but that my beliefs about the world were mistaken. Of course, I’d not understood the Russians, their circumstances, and their hopes to live without communism. But also that I hadn’t understood America, why she means so much to everyone else in the world, and what she should mean to me.

For the Russian school teacher, her country had been telling her lies for decades. She saw through it, the way everyday people always see through the emperor’s new clothes.

Her greatest hero was the man her country had been telling her was her greatest enemy. But for her, the life in America, what America stood for, and what the President of America stood for, meant more to her than all the fibs, falsehoods, and fake news they’d fed her in a lifetime.

No, I wasn’t appreciative enough as a kid. Perhaps none of us are.

But in the years since, I’ve learned what immigrants to our teeming shores, beat-up people around the world, and our own improving society at home have recognized again and again about America.

And this Thursday, I will Give Thanks for living in the greatest country the world has ever known.