JACKSON — The Thanksgiving column is one of the easiest to write because we have so much to be thankful for.
I have been thinking a lot about Mississippi and the nature of our state and the mentality of its people.
It is almost a given, in the mainstream conversation, that Mississippi suffers from a low standard of living and, thus, its people are deprived.
The problem with this line of thinking is the fundamental assumption that material wealth is the key measure of well-being. Certainly, material prosperity is a good thing, but we all know that money does not buy happiness. We know this intuitively. We know this anecdotally and we know this because studies have shown spiritual well-being trumps material abundance.
So let’s think for a moment about Mississippi, not from its position of material wealth but rather its position of spiritual wealth.
For starters, we know that Mississippi is the most religious state in the nation. We know this because poll after poll has shown this to be true.
As a consequence of our faith, Mississippi is also the most generous state in the union. The least material state in the union is the most willing to give what material wealth they have to help others. Wow!
Now let’s think about this for a moment in terms of where you want to live and who you want to interact with during your limited years on Earth.
Would you rather hang out with people obsessed with increasing their bank account? Or would you rather hang out with people who are so spiritually together that they are happy to share their limited resources with others in more need?
So who really has their act together? The materially greedy or the spiritually plugged in? So why, pray tell, do Mississippians have an inferiority complex? We should have a superiority complex, except for the fact that Mississippians are too spiritual to even make this case, for it’s not a humble attitude.
The kind, humble, generous, church-going average Mississippian, and I’ve met thousands, would not go there. But I will. The spiritual generosity and humility of the average Mississippian is far superior, by any philosophical measure of human logic, than the crass materialism so often displayed by many other parts of our country.
I mean the absurdity of it, that the toys we earn on the Earth define our existence. If this is true, that we are just amoebas chasing material placation, then all of life is but a cosmic joke and death is a merciful end. To live this way is tragic.
In Mississippi, we have a different perspective. Life is a blessing, a pre-condition to eternal life, ordained and controlled by a loving God and an understanding savior. Our time on Earth is a chance to do our best to display our understanding that there is so much more.
The arrogance of human understanding, divorced from the submission to a higher authority, is almost incomprehensible to fathom. To think we are the end-all of creation, and our science and technology the ultimate achievement, confesses a lack of cosmic perspective that disqualifies any claim of intellectual supremacy, much less wisdom. Yet that is the reigning philosophy of other regions of our nation. Not in Mississippi.
So today I am thankful not for the AC, the clean water, the GPS, smartphone, medicine and the cars. Today I am thankful that there is still in America one place where a majority of people have spurned these toys as tools of salvation and instead kept their eyes on the real prize.
I am also thankful for the thousands of readers and hundreds of advertisers that keep us in business, now going on a half-century.
It is a joy to be a community publisher and promote the many wonderful things about our communities. We are blessed to live in a place where people care about their neighbors and work hard to make a social contribution. Telling these positive stories is a satisfying vocation.
I have to laugh when people talk about “social media.” Community newspapers are the original social media! If someone had told me 20 years ago Facebook and Google would be competitors, I would have been dumbfounded. Who? What?
Then if you had explained that one is the leading internet search engine and the other the leading social media website, I still wouldn’t have a clue. The world is changing fast.
We’re all billionaires! It would have cost over a billion dollars 25 years ago to own a computer with the power of a typical smartphone. It would have cost a billion dollars to have instant access to all the information of the world.
After more than 100 years, community newspapers are still doing their thing and it’s working. In addition to positive news of achievements, we also try to report some of the tougher, yet important, stories challenging our government to do better.
We are thankful for your support. What we do is valuable. Journalism needs to be supported by readers and advertisers. We have reported on government waste that has probably saved millions of taxpayer dollars from being squandered.
Real reporting costs money, so be sure to renew your subscriptions. It is money well spent. Without newspapers as watchdogs, taxpayers will find they lose far more in government waste than they ever spent subscribing to a newspaper.
Happy Thanksgiving and may the pecan pie be perfect this year.
Emmerich is editor and publisher of The Northside Sun in Jackson and president of Emmerich Newspapers.
