The Savage Hue: Gratitude Against all Odds

The Savage Hue

I read Vermont Royster’s “And the Fair Land” every Thanksgiving. The ritual usually feels grounding. Reading it tonight (November 26, 2025) the text lands like a warning label on a package we have already opened.

When Royster wrote this in 1961, the “social discord” he lamented was visceral. The Bay of Pigs had failed spectacularly in April. The Berlin Wall rose in August, slicing a continent in half with concrete and barbed wire. The “young arrayed against old” described a physical struggle to break a caste system. The Freedom Riders were firebombed in Anniston just months prior. The disquiet came from the pain of necessary progress, compounded by the external terror of the Cold War. The “strangers in far-off corners” were men with nuclear codes. When Royster described “the savage face of war,” he was writing to a generation that watched Nikita Khrushchev bang his shoe at the UN and felt the cold wind of nuclear annihilation blowing off the Cuban coast.

The anxiety felt existential. It bit deep, grounded in tangible stakes: rights, borders, survival.

Sixty-four years later, the anxiety has mutated.

The disquiet of 2025 is a product of industrial design. Look at the headlines flanking Royster’s prose today. We see the “First Large-Scale Cyberattack by AI.” We see “Two National Guard Members Shot Near the White House.” These events are terrifying, but the ambient “air of unease” Royster noted comes from a deeper source.

We are drowning in the addiction economy.

In 1961, your neighbor’s opinion was limited to the backyard fence. Today, algorithms optimized for engagement weaponize that opinion. The “social discord” is now a business model. Tech giants in Palo Alto have discovered that outrage harvests more attention than agreement. So they feed us a steady diet of it.

This is the new “savage hue.” It is synthetic.

We are users in an extraction economy where our anxiety is the raw material. The “stranger” controlling our fate has morphed from a communist boogeyman to a black-box model or a social feed that prioritizes dopamine over truth.

It is exhausting.

The temptation to despair is logical. Royster faced the physics of destruction; we face the engineering of disruption. But if we stop there, we lose the thread.

We are terrible at celebrating the good.

We have monetized our own misery so effectively that we forget to look at the balance sheet. Royster’s central thesis was about the anomaly of the light. He argued that the “richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth… but in the men that took its measure.”

The miracle is the people.

We remain the longest enduring society of free people governing themselves.

This survival is statistically improbable. Entropy comes for nations. Order degrades. The natural state of history is the rule of kings, dictators, or technocrats. A self-governing republic is a deviation from the mean. That we are still here, arguing and striving despite the algorithmic headwinds, is the blessing.

It brings to mind Samwise Gamgee, speaking from the depths of his own darkness: “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

That line hits harder this year.

The good is the stubborn refusal to capitulate to cynicism. We find it in the teacher staying late in a crumbling school. We see it in the entrepreneur solving real problems instead of selling ads. It lives in the neighbor who puts down the phone to shovel a driveway.

These are the “men that took its measure.”

We forget them because they don’t trend. Stability is quiet. Decency doesn’t go viral. But they are the ballast keeping the ship upright.

Royster ends by invoking the Pilgrims at Delftshaven. If they had been daunted by the “troubles they saw around them,” they never would have sailed. They feared the ocean. In Royster’s time, we feared the bomb. Today, we fear the feed. The requirement remains the same.

We must be thankful that the land is still ours to shape, however hard the task. The “fair land” remains a challenge.

The storm is loud this year. But the ship is still afloat.

And for that, we can be thankful.