What it means when families gather and some don’t
There is some truth to the myth of the Pilgrims holding a day of prayer with a feast in 1621 where a group of Wampanoag natives showed up unexpectedly and shared a meal of freshly killed fowl, venison, fish, eel, and shellfish, along with some beer.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “This was a rather disorderly affair, but it sealed a treaty between the two groups that lasted until King Philip’s War (1675–76).” Yet, it never gained national acceptance because a national Thanksgiving Day seemed more like a religious lightning rod for controversy than a unifying force.
It never held the prominence that it has today until President Abe Lincoln on Oct. 3, 1863, during the Civil War, proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26. It was done to unify the country after the bloody battle of Gettysburg near the war’s end. It didn’t become a national holiday until 1941 when President Franklin Roosevelt officially declared the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving. So it is a relatively recent national holiday based on an older tradition.
This year though after a divisive political campaign and a lingering malaise from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is both a need and some doubts about joining together to hold the national feast.
The need for many of us is to find some common healing and solace to prepare for what many suspect is going to be a challenging four years of political chaos and then the doubts are about whether this nation or any nation can survive being as divided as we are along the battle lines of the culture wars. Some are pretending that the convicted and impeached former president won’t do this time what he has been boasting he’ll do since the last time he held office.
Others are complaining that the courts, the justice department and Jack Smith should just go ahead and sentence Trump or hold over the indictments until he leaves office, but no rule of actual law stops anyone from prosecuting him right now! That Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden aren’t calling for there to be a trial right now is rather cowardly!
If no man is above the law, how can Attorney General Merrick Garland not follow that law and prove that justice still prevails even against one who has so flagrantly broken so many? I’m sure that discussion could start many an argument at the family table this year. Here’s a question to be asked, as we no longer go out and kill our own fowl for this meal, nor harvest our own produce or brew our own liquor– just how is all of this going to be done without immigrant farm labor that harvests the crops, processes the turkeys and picks the grapes for your wines? Remember when we were talking about “essential workers” during the pandemic?
Next year’s Thanksgiving could be far different or far more expensive depending on what Trump gets away with. It may slowly dawn on the rural red counties across America that the immigration laws actually provide a benefit as more and more people no longer work cheaply toiling the fields. The Republican farmers will be the first to protest and scream the loudest but even their rich Republican mason owners in the cities will complain about not getting their lawns mowed and hedges trimmed. This doesn’t even take into consideration the amount of human suffering with families being separated and then deported because some are legal and others are not. This may be their last Thanksgiving dinner together.
That so many Latino men and others of immigrant backgrounds voted for the Trumpster may mean that some of their relatives get arrested and deported. I said in my last column that the real impact of the Republican 2025 agenda won’t be realized until it hits those voters’ families, friends, and neighbors next door. The seeds for economic and social chaos are now being sown even before he takes office and the bitter harvest won’t be reaped until next year and the years thereafter.
“Come on man,” you say, “you are being far too alarmist!” The fascists are at the gate and just about to burn down the government (like the Reichtstag fire) and you are pretending it doesn’t matter? This feels like pre-World War II Germany where many people were confused, scared and just didn’t believe that Hitler could be as bad as he said he would be, and then after a devastating war that destroyed their country the German people had to be shown the death camps just to prove to them the truth.
The time for resistance is now and IF the Democrats want to have any chance of defeating the Republicans in two or four years, they have to start now while they still have a chance to change the outcome. Kamala Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and even Joe Biden can’t wait to start the next campaign and show that there is some leadership! Resistance needs to start now. After all, Trump won this election on the slimmest of majorities, it is in no way a “mandate”.