Nov 18, 2007 - 09:33:13 CST
Maybe I speak only for myself, but Thanksgiving this year has a special piquancy. The world feels less stable than it did at this time last year. It feels as if the forces of chaos are gaining strength and the world just might spin completely out of control any day now.Everything I observe around me feels fragile all of a sudden. If you’ve ever walked out on ice over a body of water before it’s really safe, putting one foot forward very tentatively, then another, and listening hard for the sounds of stress, holding yourself ready to scramble backward at the first indication of collapse, that’s how things feel to me this year.
The economy, from the price of a loaf of bread to the instability of the stock market. Foreign policy and entanglements. America’s threadbare sense of itself. The war that won’t go away, at ruinous cost to our treasury, our military morale and our standing in the world. Civil strife, insurrection, military adventurism across the globe. Raving dictators in North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, elsewhere. Terrible setbacks to democratic progress in Russia, in China profound indifference to the world’s hard-won standards of environmental and product safety. It feels like we’re edging toward the abyss.
It’s as if the world is spinning under a permanently full moon.
I’m going to eat my turkey and cranberries with a special relish Thursday, but also with some melancholy. It seems like a paradox, but Thanksgiving in an disintegrating and uncertain world is more meaningful than one that merely celebrates abundance, stability, and prosperity. Abundance is not automatic, even for those who work hard and play by the rules. My grandparents knew that as the central fact of life. My parents knew it enough to be cautious. My generation has known only reckless abundance.
Actually, Thanksgiving against the odds, Thanksgiving in spite of the evidence, is firmly grounded in American history.
The first American thanksgiving (1621) was a sacrament of gratitude to celebrate the Pilgrims’ hard-won toehold on a vast and largely inhospitable continent. Thanksgiving as we now celebrate it dates to Oct. 3, 1863, at the darkest time of the Civil War, when President Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a permanent national holiday. Through most of American history, designations of days of thanksgiving were coupled with a call for prayer. We’ve been so prosperous and stable for so long that we’ve forgotten how fragile our lives really are.
I’ve known some of this fragility in my own experience, and I can always sense it burbling just below the surface as I try to glide through life. Over the past couple of years, I have witnessed the proximity of the abyss among my closest friends. Loss of loved ones in their prime — inexplicable, harrowing, crippling loss — the horror of siblings or grandchildren debilitated with disease, a serio-comic episode with the game warden (all the more hurtful for its essential innocence), bewildering setbacks in professional life, a humiliating standoff with overzealous lawmen, a child arrested in the night, a sudden wearying regimen of blood transfusions, the car accident on the county line, the job that went to someone else, a sharp quarrel with a mere stranger about ... nothing.
We like to think that life runs by a software that shelters us from chaos, but it is not so. We can increase the odds of stability by working hard, practicing thrift and living with integrity, but there are no guarantees. One day, we are planning an extension on the house, and the next day, we are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We always rolled our eyes and laughed when my grandmother said anything can be endured as long as we have our health. It does not seem so silly any more.
I’m going to dig up the last of my potatoes this week and serve them for Thanksgiving. That will give me more pleasure than almost anything else. My daughter, who is just 13, called me last night and asked me to UPS her a plastic container of my cranberry sauce. “Don’t tell her, but yours is better than Mom’s,” she said. I didn’t have the heart to say I just follow the recipe on the back of the bag. Against the odds of spillage and perishability, I will send the cranberry sauce.
The events in Pakistan (Islam’s only nuclear power) terrify me, whenever I look up from soduko or Patriots’ games long enough to gaze around. Burma (Myanmar) is coming undone, in spite of the best efforts of one of my heroes, Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I do not believe, with Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear, that “we have seen the best of our time,” but I ruminate about this proposition now more than at any previous time of my life. At $95-a-barrel oil and talk of air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, it’s hard not to feel pessimistic. Probably we will edge away from the abyss. Humankind’s capacity for muddling through is enormous. That alone is abundant cause for giving thanks.
On Thanksgiving, surrounded by family in the midst of so much abundance, we ought to remember three less fortunate groups. First, there are our troops spread across the planet, many of them in harm’s way. More than a quarter of a million Americans, mostly young, will be a world away from their loved ones this Thursday eating MRE’s. Half of them are in Iraq.
Then there are the millions of people, some of them in North Dakota, who cannot afford to spread cornucopia across the dining room table come Thursday. The price of food is sharply higher this year. The number of poor for whom the cost of gas, of fuel oil, and of food has bitten painfully into their lives is sharply higher. Finally, there are those for whom personal losses in 2007 have made this Thanksgiving a bittersweet charade.
I believe in grace, and I want to live in joy. For all of these disquieting notes, I know we have much to be thankful for, in some sense now more than ever. I am immensely thankful for my friends, some of them new friends in 2007. I am so thankful to live in North Dakota, which understands Thanksgiving better than any other place I have lived. I am thankful for the opportunities I have to do satisfying work. I am thankful for my mother. We’re no longer a “nuclear family”: we’re just a hydrogen atom these days, a single electron spinning around a proton nucleus. It’s hard to know just who is the electron. She travels almost as much as I do.
Above all else, I am thankful for a winsome 13-year-old who is the greatest blessing of my life, and without whom my life would be a dry shard, and who is now waiting for a package at the other end of the Great Plains.
At the grocery store the other day I bought a giant turkey, at least three times bigger than I need for mother and me. It was like a statement of defiance against the times. And now I need to buy more cranberries and a really high-end piece of Tupperware.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@aol.com.)
Michael Miller wrote on Nov 21, 2007 11:39 AM:
A kind and steady heart wrote on Nov 20, 2007 3:46 PM:
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