Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.

The passage is a call to civic and spiritual confidence framed in the ritual moment of Thanksgiving. Brooks urges listeners to reject nostalgia and despair alike: to “stand up” is to assume moral responsibility, and to “believe in man” is to affirm human dignity and the possibility of progress even amid social strain. The insistence on “clear eyes” and sobriety suggests a mature optimism—hope grounded not in naïveté but in honest appraisal. By declaring that no better time or place has existed, Brooks reframes gratitude as active commitment to one’s present community, implying that the task is not to flee the age but to serve it.