Start a New Trend - Give Thanks This Thanksgiving Day

National media often has a tendency to focus on the negative-what's bad, wrong, and disturbing in our families, our culture and our nation. Often, even positive news is given a negative twist. This has become so habitual we, often, don't even expect positive news when we view news shows or open the paper. But, constant focus on the negative is harmful to the very foundation of our civilization.

Focusing on the dark, the hurtful, the negative has led to students turning on other students and teachers with deadly results. Focusing on the negative in a relationship often leads husbands and wives to forget those positives about each other that brought them together in the first place and to dwell on the hurts, the irritations, the negatives. Such a focus may lead directly to divorce.

As many in our government and in the media focus only on the negative with regard to Iraq, not only does it change attitudes at home, but also emboldens the enemy. The result is very real harm to our soldiers. Focusing on the negatives in our lives steals the joy from our days, causing even our children to view the future with trepidation instead of optimism. This is so different from a positive attitude of thanksgiving.

The Thanksgiving holidays, especially Thanksgiving Day, gives us the opportunity to balance what we so often see and hear around us. Thanksgiving Day gives us the chance to view the world through a different set of glasses as we offer thanksgiving for our blessings rather than complaints about our problems, a chance to focus on the positives in our lives rather than the negatives. In fact, celebrating Thanksgiving Day, as a day of thanksgiving, provides an opportunity for us as families to start a tradition of highlighting the good things in our lives that happen every day. These include thanksgiving for things we take for granted such as a home, food, even a table on which to put our food. When was the last time we gave thanks for something as basic as indoor plumbing? The family table is an ideal place to start listing daily blessings in an attitude of thanksgiving. We can even make a game of spotting those blessings, even in what might be less than ideal circumstances. (A bad grade might give a child incentive to study harder next time.) Thanksgiving is not just an emotion, but also a learned behavior. By our example we either encourage an attitude of complaining or one of thanksgiving.

Focusing on the positive and an attitude of thanksgiving has constructive benefits physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, because such a focus lifts up rather than tears down, changes attitudes, instills joy and replaces fear with hope.

This Thanksgiving holiday season, and especially on Thanksgiving Day, let us begin a new trend in our families-a thankful heart and a positive outlook. Let's do it for ourselves, our families, our nation and our world. It might also be a good idea to, sometimes, turn off those commentators and politicians who view everything in shades of black.