Finding Gratitude in a World That Only Wants Shame
The Teacher was happy for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. It meant crafts and crafts was easy as shit. Construction paper, scissors, crayons. The students were making palm turkeys. She could relax for a moment as they put their heads down and channeled their artistry.
Tim raised his hand. She sighed.
"Yes, Tim?"
"Teacher. I read on Twitter that Thanksgiving was not a good holiday. That instead of a celebration of the Pilgrims and Native Americans coming together, it is a holiday celebrating the colonization of the country and the genocide of her indigenous people. I read on Twitter that they didn't even eat turkeys and this whole holiday is white supremacy trying to indoctrinate us to ignore our brutal and horrifying past."
Fucking Twitter, she thought.
"Well, Tim. I would never want to argue with Twitter. There are a few things missing from Twitter's narrative.
You're right that the Pilgrims and the Native Americans weren't eating turkey. Also, what we know about that day in 1621 comes from written accounts from Pilgrims who were white and colonizing the region. What we believe to be true is that feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest.
The Pilgrims celebrated this with the Wampanoags, a tribe of Native Americans who, along with the last surviving Patuxet, had helped them get through the previous winter by giving them food in that time of scarcity, in exchange for an alliance and protection against the rival Narragansett tribe. The natives were just as warlike as any other society and the Wampanoags needed the help and protection of the Pilgrims and the Pilgrims, unused to the new environment, needed the Wampanoags for help with food.
The holiday didn't become a national one until Abraham Lincoln, at the insistence of Sarah Josepha Hale who wrote letters to politicians for approximately 40 years advocating an official holiday, announced the need during the Civil War for a day to celebrate ‘with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience .. fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation...’
But Tim, there's more!
Although the American Thanksgiving developed in the colonies of New England, its roots can be traced back to the other side of the world. Both the Separatists who came over on the Mayflower and the Puritans who arrived after brought with them a tradition of providential holidays—days of fasting during difficult or pivotal moments and days of feasting and celebration to thank God in times of harvest.
Thanksgiving falls under a category of festivals that spans cultures, continents and millennia.
In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans feasted and paid tribute to their gods after the fall harvest. Thanksgiving also bears a resemblance to the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. Finally, historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting and merrymaking long before Europeans set foot on America's shores."
"So we didn't invent Thanksgiving?"
"No, Tim. Thanksgiving is celebrated on various dates in the United States, Canada, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia. Versions of a harvest feast are celebrated all over the planet."
"I still feel ashamed of my ancestors. I feel ashamed that I'm white. I think we all should feel shame instead of celebrating some harvest or whatever. We don't even have a harvest anymore because Big Farm has squeezed out the little farmers, mostly those BIPOC farmers. Some harvest..."
"Well, Tim, I suppose that's your right to feel ashamed of yourself. It is not OK for you to decide that because you feel ashamed that everyone else has to feel it, too. Most of the class is thinking about what they are grateful for which isn't a terrible thing to do for one day a year."
"What could we possibly be grateful for when so many are dead? Are we celebrating on the graves of the past sins of our forefathers? Did you even read The 1619 Project?"
The Teacher gritted her teeth. "Tim, I'm grateful for the fact that extreme poverty in the world has dropped by 90% or so in the past 100 years, that civil rights in this country are better than they've ever been in history, that our president just signed an infrastructure bill so massive it rivals FDR's Works Progress Act, and that you can read Twitter feeds that criticize our country so vehemently. Other countries just disappear their citizens like that Chinese tennis player.
I'm thankful to live in a country where Hannah Jones is allowed to write a book called The 1619 Project and that everyone is allowed to read it and she wrote it after legal slavery has gone from prevalent in 193 countries 200 years ago to only three countries today.
I'm also grateful for having so much food in America that even our poorest citizens are overweight rather than starving, that despite the horrors of Big Pharma killing off hundreds of thousands with legal narcotics, they still managed to create a vaccine to combat a global pandemic in record time. I'm grateful that today, Mr. Garmin can't call me 'SugarTits' in the faculty lounge without losing his job."
"Yes, but Twitter says..."
"It's ONE. FUCKING. DAY. You don't wanna make the turkey, make something else like a construction paper small pox blanket. And you should be thankful at least in this moment that corporal punishment in schools was outlawed long before you born."
