Nation: THANKSGIVING 1968: MIXED BLESSINGS

Americans, looking back on the tumultuous events of 1968, may be more inclined to ask God’s mercy and guidance than to offer Him thanks for His blessings.

LYNDON JOHNSON’S fifth and final Thanksgiving Proclamation was not the conventional catalogue of national self-congratulation. How could it be, after the sort of year the nation—and the world—has experienced? Flat and matter-of-fact, it fell far short of eloquence. Yet in tone and temper, it probably came close to expressing the mood of Americans in a year many of them would rather forget.

For the U.S. there are, as always, plentiful reasons enough for thanksgiving. The nation has rarely been more prosperous; peace is a more realistic hope; the country is increasingly aware of the problems it must solve. The election proved, as the President noted in his proclamation, “the endurance and stability of our democracy, as we prepare once more for an orderly transition of authority.” The country avoided extremism and the constitutional crisis of a deadlock in the Electoral College. Despite apathy, the U.S. may now be spurred to reform the archaic laws that could permit such a crisis to develop in a future election.

Götterdammerung. Still, anyone who has lived through what Theologian Martin Marty calls “this year of impersonal and brutalizing chaos” knows that there are reasons enough too for disillusionment. Beyond the assassinations, beyond even the riots and racial divisions, there is a vague anxiety that the machine of the 20th century is beginning to run out of control.

To test human tolerance to supersonic airliners, which may disturb as many as 130 million Americans every day by 1975 with sonic booms, a panel of scientists last week recommended an immediate program of experimental flights over populated areas. “It’s not clear,” said Harvard Scientist Roger Revelle, “just how intolerable is ‘intolerable.’ ” That question would apply to many aspects of modern life. In city after city in the U.S., strikes or slowdowns have closed schools, stopped garbage collection, endangered the public safety. The city itself sometimes seems more malignant enemy than hospitable friend. Looking at the sunset from a Los Angeles freeway—refracted through smog and windshield—Los Angeles Times Columnist Jack Smith wondered what a man from an earlier century might have felt if he had sat beside him in the automobile: “A rational man, like Dr. Johnson, must surely see that the species had at last given up its glimmer of sanity and was annihilating itself in this magnificent, psychotic Götterdammerung.”

Abroad, the prospect of improved relations with the Soviet Union, a goal that seemed within reach in the mid ’60s, has been set back by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. As a new Administration prepares to take power, Americans are questioning for the first time in a generation their basic role in the world community. Though the signs of plenty abound throughout the Western world, the chronic international money crisis threatens to produce political as well as fiscal instability for millions (see THE WORLD).

If “the natural role of 20th century man is anxiety,” as Norman Mailer’s General Cummings said in The Naked and the Dead, Americans beginning the last third of the century are bearing their full load. “Uncertainty is the way it is now,” says Joshua Golden, assistant professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. “People can be comforted if they understand that it’s a normal occurrence.”

In this respect Americans today may be different from their ancestors. “People now are better informed,” says Los Angeles Psychiatrist Jerome Jacobi.

“Now they pick up the gaps in credibility and are not so ready to accept the old cliches. It’s not just facts that become known, but awareness of contradictions, arbitrariness and ambiguity.”

A Narrowing Path. Paradoxically, uncertainty has also helped to create the polarization that is one of the dominant facts of America today. Those attached to the old ideas and ideals cling to them even more tenaciously; those attracted to the new fight for it with greater energy. The path narrows between the new and the old. Today, says Astronomer Walter Orr Roberts, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “it is necessary to live with enough conservatism to resist the easy abandonment of concepts, but enough flexibility to be able, when necessary, to switch rather than fight.”

Oddly enough, the uneasy mood and the uncertain temper may in their own way be a cause for thanksgiving. With an innocent optimism that has always been a great strength, Americans have usually seen their glasses as half full, confident that they would eventually be brimming over; others, more accustomed to want, usually see their glasses as half empty, fearful that the rest, too, will soon drain away. No longer are Americans that smugly certain—and where there is doubt there is also the impulse for change. Thanksgiving has sometimes been seen as a giant Sears catalogue of the country’s virtues and material possessions. Ideally, it should be a time for review and consideration.

As Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin observes, the test of intelligence is not what men know how to do, but “how they behave when they don’t know what to do.”