Thanksgiving is not only a time to count our blessings, but also to ask the question of why that seems increasingly hard for us to do as a nation?  There is a phrase that keeps cropping up in quotes from the famous and ordinary alike, pointing to something important in the American psyche, and perhaps telling us why we are the most privileged and yet also the most frustrated people on Earth. The assertion starts with "Nobody should have to..." and ends in a variety ways.

In a speech about child care, President Clinton said it this way: "Nobody should have to choose between their children and their work.”

In a documentary about a tragic airplane crash, one of the survivors who was suing for a great deal of money - stated "Nobody should have to go through what I went through."

While certainly none of us wants to experience heartache, disruption or loss, and while incompetence should be punished, the nagging question remains as to where such a notion has come from.  Why do we, as a culture, tend to accept the idea that bad - or even difficult - things should not happen to people like us? Though it does not stand up under even the slightest scrutiny, it nevertheless persists and makes us too often look like an immature and spoiled nation.

Perhaps part of this idea comes from a distorted and self-serving reading of our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Somehow we have recast this as the right to a good life, liberty from all impediments to our fulfillment, and a guarantee of happiness.

A great deal of our energy as a culture is spent in seeking out diversion and pleasure - working feverishly every day to find new ways to experience it.  And there seems little sense that a fun-filled, worry-free life is an unattainable goal.  Quite the contrary, it has become something we are entitled to.

I hate to kick a profession when it's down, but could it be that attorneys and the litigious atmosphere they have helped create takes us further down this road, until we end up believing we should be compensated for everything above an inconvenience?

We seem to have little trouble bringing this "nobody should" mentality down to the minor difficulties or intrusions of life, which results in the lack of civility so characteristic of our culture.

The leap from any perceived deprivation or offense against us is not too difficult to make, to the point where we feel deserving of some retribution; whether it is rudeness, verbal rage or even violence:

"Nobody should have to sit in trraffic like this..."
"Nobody should have to stand in a line this long..."
"Nobody should have to pay taxes this high..."
"Nobody should have their freedoms limited like this..."

The mystery to me is not that bad things happen, but that more bad things don't.  When you think about all that could go wrong in the human body, for instance, isn't it a miracle that our health is as good as it is?

Yet I have been surprised by the tone of some who protest for disease research, which comes across like a spoiled child: "I want my cure and I want it now!"

I guess no one should ever have to go through a painful illness.

I am certainly for safety and support sanctions for those who ignore it, but when you consider how many airplanes there are in the sky at any given moment, isn't it amazing that there aren't more crashes?

And it's one thing to say we should work to find better child care solutions for people who work, but quite another to suggest that we are entitled to solutions to our problems - no matter what they are - from someone or something  outside ourselves.

We seem to believe pain and suffering are an unmitigated evil, to be avoided at all costs or reimbursed for.  The fact that time and eternity have taught us that these primal experiences of life can produce perseverance, empathy, strength of character and a myriad of other positive traits, seems to have been lost on us. We say “no pain, no gain" but we don't mean it.

When I consider how the majority of the world lives - basically by the unremitting sweat of their brow and with a lack of resources and opportunity - I would personally be embarrassed to talk about what I shouldn't have to go   through.

I just hope that makes me more thankful this Thanksgiving.

This site opened:  November 25, 1998.   Last Update: November 25, 1998