Just as we cherish our individual freedom, we should also cherish America’s tradition of binding ourselves together in community for common purpose, a binding that inevitably imposes certain restraints on us.

Traditionally, these restraints were understood to be essential to freedom. The most important of them, in this view, were not formal laws and rules imposed by government; rather they were informal rules of society: mores, customs, ideas about private responsibilities, a collection of values and practices thought necessary to sustain self-government and healthy communities as well.

Today, the notion of such restraints is often rejected out of hand. Certainly, the popular culture is hostile to the idea. Freedom should be near unbridled when it comes to private matters, the popular culture teaches. Whatever people do is their business, so long as it doesn’t hurt someone else.

Unfortunately, the effects of much supposedly private behavior cannot always be confined to those who willingly engage in it. It is not so “private” after all; the community and individuals suffer greatly.

Since Thanksgiving’s origins lie in the calculated forming of a community, today is a fitting time to recall the necessary relationship between community and freedom, why we ought to reassert certain values of community.

From the beginning Americans looked to community and its restraints as protecting freedom. The First Thanksgiving was a celebration of a community bound together through the Mayflower Compact. The signers did . . . “solemnly & mutually in the Presence of God, and one of another, covenant & combine our selves together into a civil Body Politick; for our better Ordering, & Preservation . . ." Community was also the aim of the Declaration: new “political bands” to “secure the blessings of liberty” in pursuit of “self-evident truths.” Likewise, for the U.S. Constitution: forming “a more perfect union,” securing “the blessings of liberty.”

Beyond understanding that these benefits could be achieved only in community, and of particular interest in our day, the Founders knew that effective self-government , individual freedom, and healthy communities, had to be built on the character of the people-virtue. They would have been puzzled by the divorce of public from private values in our own time.

The Founder’s understanding of freedom rooted in virtue and community gradually went out of vogue; its death throes took solid hold in the ‘60s, at least in the popular culture. The results remain clear: Anti-heroes-certain rock stars, movie stars, professional athletes and shock radio hosts-sneer at the mores of community; they are often celebrated as role models. Popular music glorifies violence against society, glorifies the perverse, and promotes racism-all in the name of freedom.

There is no right or wrong in this view of freedom, only private choices, one as good as any other, in other words, there are no absolutes - the old liberal mantra, "everything is relative". Movies, magazines, and sit-coms push the same values-a shallow, empty hedonism.

One result of such values is that tens of millions of youngsters suffer; they are the spawn of the frighteningly efficient poverty machine that ran full-throttle through the ‘90s. These are children born out of wedlock, out of the pursuit of individual freedom, that would not, we were assured, hurt anyone else.

These children deserve healthy community around them, one not torn apart by individual license, but one bound together in loving values born of responsibility.

The Mayflower Compact was born of dissension and dissatisfaction that could have doomed the budding community from the start. The signers agreed that, whatever their differences, the need for community outweighed their individual desires. They bound themselves by covenant, giving up certain individual freedoms to gain larger ones.

That signing 383 years ago reminds us that binding ourselves in healthy communities is as central to our heritage as is individual freedom. It is not one or the other. Both are necessary. The two are always in tension, waxing and waning with time and events. They need to be balanced. But in what we call freedom today-more license than freedom-wears a strange face: A radical individualism, divorced from responsibility and the ties of community, is weakening the values that bind us together. We need more advocates for these values. And on this Thanksgiving, grateful for the blessings of both individual freedom and the comfort of community, ever mindful of our obligations to others around us, we say: Blessed be the ties that bind!