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The Common Good

Creator: Helen Keller (author)
Date: November 1934
Publication: Home Magazine
Source: Towson University


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The Coomon Good is an ideal which is mightier than any man and worthy of all men, says Helen Keller

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ON Thanksgiving Day Americans commemorate the triumph of a little group of men and women who believed in God, and that His Kingdom would prevail upon earth.

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Inspired by this belief, they endured unimaginable privations and dangers, and surmounted the greatest obstacles. Ungrudgingly they labored that the nation they were founding might grow and become a wide and fair habitation of men. They had brought from the Old World a determination to live the Christian Life.

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For nearly a hundred years their descendants followed with some measure of fidelity the ideals of their fathers. But, unfortunately, from the beginning the canker-worm of slavery had crept into the heart of the new nation. The war between the South and the North brought to a head the division and strife engendered by this violation of human liberty.

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When the Civil War was ended, a profound change took place in the American people. They departed from the faith and simple ways of the Founders and started on the perilous road of material prosperity, and a period of economic serfdom began.

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Dazzled by inventions and exploitation of the vast resources in which the country abounded, the people lost the vision of the Kingdom of God. The time came when almost every American was afraid to be poor, and despised anyone who elected to remain poor in order to simplify his life and save his conscience. They lost even the power of imagining what their ideal of a nation of God-fearing men had been. They could not conceive liberation from material things or the unbribed soul and manly indifference to personal gain. They thought not of paying their way through life by what they were or what they did, but by what they wrested from others in one way or another.

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This unethical prosperity has broken down. A flood of adversity has swept over us which has opened our eyes to many things. Already changes have occurred in the United States that seem almost incredible.

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Much of this change has been effected on the basis of the surrender of individualism and the acceptance of a leadership of men who believe that it is not a time to try to patch up things as they were and pretend that they were right. What thoughtful men want is not a breaking up of all our institutions and laws, but a new social order of cooperation and willing assistance by all the people. Thus once more the adversity of a nation is creating an attitude which will regenerate its ideals

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Let us on this day of national thanksgiving rejoice that an ever increasing number of Americans will never again give thanks for anything which will make others poorer or divide and darken humanity.

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There is only one true kind of national greatness, and that is to hold fast to, and conscientiously work for the ideal of the Common Good which is mightier than any man and worthy of all men.

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