Make America grateful again

Nov 23, 2017

"I'm lucky that I have so much that's alive and good for you and vibrant," he insisted. "I've been actually, really lucky."

So said Vice President Joe Biden during a taping of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" last week. On a purely professional level, information technology is almost impossible to argue with the former vice president. He was elected the sixth-youngest United States senator in 1973, serving for 36 years before spending eight years as President Barack Obama'south second-in-command. While he is certainly not a universally beloved figure — is such a feat even possible in these polarized times? — Vice President Biden stands with leaders similar Sen. John McCain and Gov. John Kasich as a rare pol who commands bipartisan respect. As Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said in 2015, "If you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, and then you've got a problem."

In the personal sphere, nevertheless, Biden has encountered tremendous loss. Several weeks afterward first winning his Senate seat, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident that also left his sons Young man and Hunter with critical injuries. Two years ago, Beau Biden — a veteran and highly regarded politico in his own right — died following a two-yr battle with encephalon cancer. His death is by and large considered the reason his father decided not to seek the presidency in 2016.

I had the great fortune to sit in the audience as Vice President Biden affirmed his smashing fortune to Mr. Colbert. What was most surprising was that his claims of good luck referred non to his public career but to his private life.

"Fellow's still with me. I hear his voice. It's a constant reassurance, and it's a abiding push," he said. "I look at his son, and I see my Beau. I expect at his brother; I come across Boyfriend. I look at his sis; I see Beau."

It would be like shooting fish in a barrel, understandable, and even justifiable for Biden to experience bitterness and anger after losing his son, feelings he expressed in Task-similar anguish following his married woman and daughter'southward death.

"I liked to [walk effectually seedy neighborhoods] at night when I thought there was a amend chance of finding a fight," he later on wrote of that flow in his book Promises to Keep. "I had not known I was capable of such rage. … I felt God had played a horrible trick on me."

It is possible that he harbored similar emotions surrounding Beau's death when he was in the privacy of his dwelling. But if he is bearing his son's memory as he relayed on "The Late Show," one gets the sense that there is a mysterious peace at play in Joe Biden.

Maybe he feels compelled to convey promise and strength on behalf of his grandchildren and his son's widow. Mayhap his organized religion comforts him with the belief that his son is not only nowadays in the ones he loves only also truly with him in spirit.

Ultimately, I imagine  Biden understands what anyone who has undergone extraordinary loss knows: that it has an awful, powerful power to strip life downward to its starkest terms. These include the inconsolable agony Biden described afterwards the expiry of his wife and girl. But it too includes the wisdom Colbert talked about in this interview as well as the gratitude he once chronicled in a GQ article.

" 'What punishments of God are not gifts?' " asked Mr. Colbert, quoting J.R.R. Tolkien. "[I]t would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you desire it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head."

Wisdom and gratitude do not protect the soul from suffering over again, merely they do grant it a keener appreciation for the style that new life and new beauty always succeed death. In the case of his wife and daughter, Biden was blessed with two sons mature beyond their years ("I started looking upwards to my boys when they were in their teens," he told Colbert). In the case of his son, he is left with children and grandchildren who enquire him to "tell more stories near Daddy," who help carry Beau'southward legacy and give Joe Biden a purpose to make "Beau proud of me."

Soon before Biden took the stage, Dead and Visitor performed two songs that appeared on a afterward episode of "The Late Testify." Consisting of several surviving members of the Grateful Dead and John Mayer, the grouping attracted a number of Deadheads to the audience, including one who wore a shirt embossed with the words "Make America Grateful Again."

Information technology was an advisable bulletin, given Biden's part in the political arena and his reflections that evening. And it is a bulletin any of us can take to heart this Thanksgiving — as individuals, in our respective communities and, dare I say, even in our country.

What is wonderful almost this make of gratitude is its honesty. It does not castor complications, challenges, miseries or misfortunes under the rug with rejoinders to "Count your blessings!" or "Recollect of all y'all have!"

Rather, it is a recognition, won but by time and trial, that the finitude and suffering we all are bound to confront will too ever come with a second act. Pain begets purpose. Loss is accompanied by beloved. Decease gives way to life.

For this, we give thanks.

[Brian Harper is a communications specialist for the Midwest Jesuits. His writing has been featured in America mag, the Milwaukee Journal Spotter, National Catholic Reporter, and diverse other publications. You tin can find his work at brianharper.net.]

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