Thanksgiving in Troublesome Times

Picture the first Thanksgiving in that poetic pose we’ve always imagined with freshly arrived Pilgrims and the original American patriots sitting around a bountiful table with turkey, dressing and all the trimmings. I wonder if they burst into a round of “This land is your land; this land is my land” or did the natives find it hard to imagine who these pale faces were and what language they were speaking. Did they wonder about what the lack of immigration laws would do to their peaceful lives so in tune with the land that belonged to all of the people.

Never in their wildest imaginations did those first Americans think that they just might get swindled out of their own country and end up in Oklahoma. Or that all those treaties they signed would not be worth the paper on which they were printed. The artist rendition shows a subdued scene of the originals and their peace pipe and a white guy with his long gun over his shoulder just to the left of center in the upper group looking for any sort of trouble that might erupt so that he could shoot in self-defense, like they do in Wisconsin and get away with murder.

We all know that our culture is a far cry from the one into which the original pilgrims wandered, and our prayers can’t hold a candle to theirs. And yet I believe that in spite of all the affluence and arrogance around us, there is inside each and every immigrant on the face of this good earth a hunger for the stuff that money cannot buy and this realization that we do not live by bread or cranberry sauce or fossil fuels alone. In spite of appearances to the contrary, we live in an empty world that will call upon us all to pick up that pilgrim spirit in order to bring peace and hope in a world going mad between those who have too much and those who have hardly anything.

So come ye thankful people come, raise the song of harvest home, but also come admitting that the nation that’s counting its blessings is a country of dire differences:  between the filthy rich and the dirt poor; the well-fed and the malnourished; the well-healed and the ones without medical care at all. Deeply held convictions of white supremacy seem to have wandered back into the broad daylight to disrupt everything from school board meetings to democracy itself. Throw in to all of this the climate crises that will bring it all to an end before we know it, you’d have to agree that these are indeed troublesome times.

Just weeks before she died, Anne Frank, that sixteen year old victim of the most heinous hate in recent history, says so succinctly what we all need to hear: I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals…