Another Thanksgiving, Taken Personally

So now we in the United States end another Thanksgiving weekend, in the odd way we have recently evolved for doing this. 

First of all, Thanksgiving itself has a convoluted history.  We’re taught that it all goes back to the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts in the early 1600s, how they gathered with the natives to give thanks for the food they all had (some Virginians claim the first event of this nature actually happened at Jamestown some years ahead of the event at Plymouth).  Later, of course, the European colonists expanded west decimating the native peoples and cultures.  

The official national celebration, however, originated with Abraham Lincoln in the aftermath of the great Civil War battle of Gettysburg, which cost so many lives, halted the Confederate invasion of the north, and inspired Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Thanksgiving Day did not achieve a settled date until the twentieth century.

In the course of the twentieth century, the day’s celebrations came to include college football games and parades with huge floats in several east coast cities.

In recent years, commercial interests have caught up with Thanksgiving.  The day after Thanksgiving, “Black Friday,” is the traditional start of the Christmas Shopping Season.  This is when retailers are desperate to make lots of sales, because so much of their success and survival depends upon sales during the Christmas season.

For me—a Unitarian Pagan—it is difficult to associate with the Pilgrims (although Unitarians do have a connection to those Massachusetts Puritans, and I am thankful for what I have).  My focus is not on shopping.  Even if I may give or receive presents at Christmas time, it is not my priority (although I very much value my time with friends and family at this time of year).

On top of that (and this may seem trivial to some of you), I don’t particularly like turkey!  I don’t care that much for potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauces—all those traditional foods that Americans feel they “must” eat at Thanksgiving.

Indeed, my entire connection to these traditions is a bit conflicted—I’ll be talking about this more by and by.  Even on Veterans Day, and Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, I feel a little different than most Americans.

I grew up among the military, but not military.  I grew up a civilian among the military (my father worked for the American Red Cross, with the military).  I didn’t live in one settled place until I was twenty-six.  When I entered the College of William and Mary, as a Junior, at age twenty, I had lived on U. S. military bases for a total of ten years—half my life.  An additional two years, I had lived just a few blocks outside an Air Force Base.  Twelve years connected with the military by the time I was twenty!  And of that, five years I lived outside the U.S.

This is just one factor that colors my attitudes towards Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving.  I can’t give a vanilla American perspective on Thanksgiving.  I do know that many people share my misgivings about “Black Friday” and even football.  But I can only speak for myself, out of my own rather unusual perspective.  More of this, perhaps, to come.

Awakening on Thanksgiving, 2012

Woke up this Thanksgiving morning with many thoughts all jumbled together, trying to form a coherence.  Rather than coherence here, I’ll aim for images and splotches of feelings.

Thinking of William Burroughs, having finished reading Naked Lunch last night.  I know people personally wounded by addiction, or the addictions of their friends or relatives.

Thinking of Burroughs poem, “Thanksgiving Day, 1986” (quoted below).

Thinking of guns.  A friend of mine is buying a gun to defend herself from a stalker.  I’ve been reflecting on that, but I’ll share those thoughts later; they need to settle a bit more.

Thinking of friends far away, hoping I get to know them better as the years come and pass.

Thinking of the United States, and all the countries and people of the Americas, actually; and the world.

Thinking of places I’d like to visit and know better—particularly Latin America.

Thinking of the film I saw over the weekend, George Wallace, with Gary Sinise and Angelina Jolie.    

Thinking of the white southerners depicted in the film, and the blacks brought here as slaves, “freed,” then left to fend for themselves in a hostile, exploiting society.

Thinking of Martin Luther King, killed for demanding justice

Thinking of John Kennedy, assassinated on this date, forty-nine years ago.

Thinking.

. . .

Wondering (when I woke up, anyway) whether people fall into three categories:  People who have always lived in the same place, people who have willingly travelled about, and people who are taken against their will to other places.

Waking this morning, I felt a great connection to all the people who had come to the Americas from Europe.  I’d been reading, last night, about Buenos Aires; and thinking about the many people of the Americas who came here from Europe (and wondering why someone would leave the place they were born, to live and die somewhere else, far from their parents, family, and what they were used to).

Then thinking about people who have never lived anywhere other than where they were born; whose ancestors have lived there as well, as far back as memory or history goes.  Wondering how it is possible to stay in one place.  My own background is so different.

Thinking about Africa, the original home of all humans, scientists say (though indigenous American legends and so on would dispute that); Africa the Great Indigenous Homeland (yet how differently “Whites” think of the “Black Africans” and the “Native Americans” and the “Australian Aboriginals” and themselves).

And thinking about the people who were conquered, or who were enslaved, or who were kidnapped and dragged off somewhere else against their will; abused, exploited, tortured, killed; considered of no importance other than for how they could be used.

And thinking of our current situation, the vast machinery of Black Friday, in the land where the commercial exploitation of each holiday begins at midnight at the end of the previous holiday; or even sooner—where Santa Claus now appears in stores not long after Halloween, before we’ve even staggered into Thanksgiving.

A friend of mine calls the United States a “heaving monstrosity.”  Burroughs, in his inimitable way, says “Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.”

Nevertheless, I’m still thankful for my friends, my lovers, my family.  I’m still glad I’ve grown up and live in the United States.  I’m thankful for my own past and my own present, in spite of the contradictions and paradoxes and darkness contained therein (along with the light).