Finneran: In Praise of Many Things

Friday, December 09, 2016

Tom Finneran, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

‘Tis the season to be grateful.................

The back-to-back timing of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays puts many folks into a state of extended good cheer. May it long continue.

Americans have much to cheer about. The plain fact of being an American citizen means that you’ve already won one of life’s most important lotteries. First, and most importantly, you are free. Second, you live in a land of economic opportunity. Don’t take it for granted.........there are about seven billion people who live elsewhere who would trade places with you in a nanosecond. We now lead lives that are superior to the lives lead by the royal families of old. They had rotten food, rotten health care, rotten transportation, and largely rotten societies. Our troubles are minuscule in comparison.

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I’m grateful for PBS. I can edit and discount the politics. It’s something that all Americans must do these days, no matter what their source of political news might be. Rather I cheer and appreciate PBS for Masterpiece Theater, for Nature, for fabulous cooking shows, for travel programs, for musical performances, for American Experience, for This Old House, for American Masters, and for the always amazing Nova. Call it impressive, entertaining, and instructive. It is television done well.

I’m grateful for good schools and good teachers. Is there any better feeling for a parent or grandparent to experience than that of sending a child to a good school, a school filled by good teachers? Certainly we’d all like to see more good and great schools and more good and great teachers. And the nation should not rest until such schools and such teachers are available to all families............

The abundance of good teachers and schools in Massachusetts is a significant economic advantage to every resident. It is also a particular though often blissfully unappreciated blessing to the students themselves.

I’m often amazed at the criticism of teachers---that they work a limited number of hours, that they have summers off, that they have frequent vacations, that they are overpaid, etc. etc. Give me a break.

Try stepping into a classroom of twenty or more students of varying backgrounds and perhaps of limited English language skills. In addition, you would quickly encounter wide differences in the natural abilities of the students. How do you creatively engage the bright students who learn quickly and easily while spending crucial time with the students who have to grind away at basic concepts? One group can become very weary and frustrated while the other group can become quite bored. Good teachers are like symphonic conductors, engaging the entire classroom in a daily performance. And such performance takes preparation, creativity, and lots of time spent on evenings and weekends.

I’m grateful for the brave 1% who wear the nation’s uniform and who serve and protect us from enemies abroad. Their work is crucial, criticized, demeaned, and misunderstood. They belong in our thoughts and in our prayers. As do their “cousins”, the police and firefighters and EMTs who serve and protect us here at home.

I’m grateful for the blessings of modern health care. Whether it’s for the care of a sick child or a failing elder, consider the stark reality of existence in many other countries. Life in such places is a grim lottery, a game played without doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medicines. The lucky and the strong can survive, if only for a while, but the weak and the sick suffer and die in sad and short order.

The churches, the philanthropists, the companies, and the communities involved in founding hospitals and funding research are saints in our midst. So too are the doctors and nurses whose broad knowledge and special skills soothe and heal. The research scientists involved in painstaking and elusive discovery work on the frontiers of medicine. Their breakthroughs are rare but invaluable gifts of life. May their work, God’s work, prosper.

I’m grateful for all of it.

Thank you. Thank you God. Thank you America.

Finneran: In Praise of Many Things

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