Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

I have written many times about the importance of giving thanks for all we are fortunate enough to have in our lives. This is not a trivial thought or gesture, but rather a core belief in the importance of humility and the recognition that we all must be thankful for all the good things we have in our lives and recognize that while we can contribute to their existence, we are all, for the most part. at the whim of destiny for the vast majority of our good fortune. That destiny can blow in our favor or against us with equal ease. Even if you are a the scion of a genteel and powerful family and even the elected leader of the greatest and most powerful country on earth. As I sit here tonight on the eve of Thanksgiving 2023, I read a brief historical review of the events that occurred sixty years ago today. I was almost ten years old and living in Madison, Wisconsin. I remember being in the fifth grade at Spring Harbor Elementary School in the class of Mrs. Hunt, an auspicious name on such an historic date. The Hunt Family was the legendary oil family of Dallas that ultimately became a model for a popular TV show about it, but on that day of 1963 was the most powerful family in a city that was so distraught about the civil rights enforcements being driven hard into the heart of Dixie by President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, that their upset boiled over into an assassination. Some say the Hunts were part of it, but we will likely never know. Some would say, far be it for them to allow the vagaries of chance to set the course of their fortunes. Whether it was a lone wolf act or the result of a complex and mysterious conspiracy doesn’t matter as much as the outpouring of hatred in that very southern city that drove events to that place of extreme violence against the democratic principles of our nation. Were the events of that day a cause for grief or thanks…or maybe both?

On that same day, Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas politician, was sworn in on the tarmac of the airport in Dallas and became the 36th president of the United States. The subsequent five years were, as Dickens might have said, the best of times and the worst of times. It was during those years that the civil rights movement found its strongest footing and the Great Society programs were given a chance to test their impact. Nothing is ever easy and those changes created improvements for sure, but it is hard to say whether those changes created permanent improvements of just ephemeral blips of socioeconomic advancement. What we also know is that it was during those five years that the Vietnam conflict grew from a police action into an outright and imperialistic atrocity that stained the American psyche for a generation. So the question becomes, should we be thankful of the events in Dallas or aggrieved? Should we revere the 60’s for all their countercultural awareness heightening or should we deplore them for bringing the beginning of the end of our post-war prosperity and righteousness? And that’s the problem with history or at least trying to gauge the good and bad of the paths that history has chosen for us. I suspect that all we can do is be thankful that we can take good things out of any part of our history to whatever degree possible. I am not sure any decade cannot be shown to be both good and bad on many differing dimensions.

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated 402 years ago by the Pilgrims after their first successful harvest in the New World. While there were only 53 Mayflower survivors to celebrate the harvest, they judiciously chose to include their Wampanoag Native American neighbors to their feast, presumably on the grounds that they were outnumbered by a factor of 2 to 1 by those natives, and to do otherwise would surely have been foolish. They may very well have been thankful for the help of the natives, or at very least for the forbearance they showed in allowing these uninvited Europeans to reside in their country and gain purchase and toehold thereon.

The next three hundred years were spent by the sons and daughters of those early settlers being far less thankful of their Native American brothers and sisters all across the land from sea to shining sea. Manifest Destiny and progress give little thanks for what they believe to be their natural birthright to take what they please through whatever means they can deploy. We may have tried in modest ways to make amends for those transgressions on Native Americans over the past century, but for the most part it is shameful to say that we have barely learned our lesson since then and continue to declare the virtues of progress and Manifest Destiny in updated form against other less native souls (the “have nots”) who nonetheless are not thanked for their contribution to most of the progression of the various “haves” of the world, but are generally cast aside as flotsam and jetsam on the march that wealth takes forward.

Many wise men have worked hard to justify these actions in either terms of natural selection or theological primacy, but any way you look at it, it boils down to people with something to otherwise lose saying that they owe thanks for their good fortune to no one other than themselves and the attributes that allowed them to prevail. Rarely is chance or humility among those attributes. Thanksgiving is a gesture of showmanship and public relations, putting a patina of an otherwise rusted set of rationalizations. Just look at how we celebrate our traditional Thanksgiving. After we have killed the fatted calf or turkey and fed the clan, we choose to sit down and watch the most barbaric of sport, based almost entirely on raw aggression and warfare. The tactics are all about domination and the cost to the participants in the battle be damned. It is amazing that we even allow professional football to be played in an enlightened community that has all the necessary evidence to show that those who compete place their lives and physical well-being at great peril…all for the same pugilistic thrill of the mob that watched the gladiators in the coliseums of Ancient Rome. And for that ability we give thanks?

I understand that I am out of step with most of my fellow citizens when it comes to things like football and its place at the Thanksgiving table. I also know that I am always at risk of being in the minority whenever commercial prosperity is posited against human dignity and egalitarianism. We are we supposed to be thankful that we are dominant and among the “haves” rather than thankful that we are enlightened enough to see the wisdom of sharing the wealth across the boundaries of “haves” and “have nots”?

Ultimately, on this Thanksgiving Day I am most thankful that I can recognize the importance of being truly thankful and not thinking that I deserve the credit for my good fortune or that I do not have the obligation (both to others AND myself) to share that good fortune. I am glad not to have played much football or to feel the need to bow to that craven image of a man with a ball trampling others less strong than himself. And perhaps mostly, I am thankful that I am willing to stand up and say these unpopular and potentially deemed self-righteous things, not because I want to lord over others for these views, but simply because they are righteous in and of themselves.