I’m Just Not That Into Thanksgiving – or – How I Learned To Stop Caring And Enjoy The Day Off
Earlier this week, Robert Jenson wrote an article on Alternet called ‘Why We Shouldn’t Celebrate Thanksgiving’. The nut of his article is rooted in this quote:
“The argument that we can ignore the collective cultural definition of Thanksgiving and create our own meaning in private has always struck me as odd.”
It’s odd to me also, and I simply can’t reconcile the Thanksgiving holiday. I spend most Thanksgivings, or at least the following days, feeling guilty about having such a good time, overeating, and leaving so many leftovers that they spoil before they can be eaten, while all in the shadow of a day commemorating the beginning of perhaps the largest genocide ever carried out in the history of our world.
A lot of people will probably react with, “Oh, lighten up.”, or, the argument that I have personally heard many times, and that Jenson writes about, which comes from our more liberal friends, which is, essentially, that we have to take the day back. We have to, as Jensen writes, “reject the culture’s self-congratulatory attempts to rewrite history… and come together on Thanksgiving to celebrate the love and connections among family and friends.”
Jensen’s response to this:
“This commitment to Thanksgiving puts these left/radical critics in the position of internalizing one of the central messages promoted by the ideologues of capitalism — that individual behavior in private is more important than collective action in public. The claim that through private action we can create our own reality is one of the key tenets of a predatory corporate capitalism that naturalizes unjust hierarchy, a part of the overall project of discouraging political struggle and encouraging us to retreat into a private realm where life is defined by consumption.”
I find this to be a reasonable response, and I agree with Jensen here wholeheartedly. I don’t think this is an argument worth having on Thanksgiving Day however, and I think there is a lot of work we need to do before we’re ready for that conversation. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time propping up this argument. I must note that I was also turned off by Jensen resorting to a NAZI analogy to prove his point, which he defends by pointing out that, “Comparisons to the Nazis are routinely overused and typically hyperbolic, but this is directly analogous.” Of course it is, it always is to the person who says it is.
Long story short, I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving today. No traditional food, no gathering with lots of people, just a quiet day in my apartment.
Unlike Jensen, I’m not doing this out of protest, and I’m not going to go for any long soul searching walks to contemplate how to resist the chains of capitalism, and our violent history. In previous years, I’ve attended anti-Thanksgiving meals and gatherings where we “took back the day” and “made it our own” (and didn’t speak once of the real history). Those celebrations were just as awkward for me as the real Thanksgiving celebrations I’ve been to. Instead of sort of blindly going about the day not thinking about the real history, we sort of blindly went about the day imagining that by actively not celebrating the way mainstream society does, we were now absolved of any complicity or guilt we felt about that dark history. Instead of owning that it indeed was our collective history as Americans, we were pushing the blame away from ourselves, and onto… I guess onto the people that were celebrating Thanksgiving.
This IS our collective history, however, no matter when your particular ancestors arrived, no matter who they were or what they did. We are all in this together, and we can’t continue to pretend that We didn’t slaughter nearly an entire race of people, or that We didn’t own slaves, or the We didn’t lynch black people, or that We didn’t consider women property that was owned by the husband. All of these things happened.
I also want to make the point that I don’t think that we as individuals should walk around feeling guilty about these things either. Neither myself or anyone I know had anything directly to do with human and civil rights abuses, or genocide, or slavery. I think the guilt we feel makes us uncomfortable and that is why we either gloss it over, or push it away. I say bring it out, talk about it, make it comfortable. Until we are able to talk about it without guilt or blame, we can’t heal, and we can’t move past it until we do.
So this year, for me, today is just a day off, and I’m going to relax and watch some movies and cook myself some food, just like I might on any other day off.
That’s right, another 10 years gone and it’s time to start talking about what the best of everything was in the Oughts. I’m going to try to do more of these over the next couple of weeks and thought I’d start with an easy one. Leave your top 5 in the comments!
Top 5 TV Shows of the Oughts:
1. The Wire
2. Arrested Development
3. The Office (UK)
4. Deadwood
5. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
avclub.com weighs in here with a top ten:
The best TV series of the ’00s | Best Of The Decade | The A.V. Club.
Question:
In times of recession or depression, is it better for government (local and federal) to focus on giving money to services (i.e. non-profits) in order to meet immediate needs, or to focus on economic development, such as job creation through infrastructure projects, in order to spur the kind of recovery that will then positively effect service providers through increased private giving and decreased need for services?
It seems to me that the most important function of government, right now, should be to promote projects that create local jobs. One person in a household with a decent full time job makes that household exponentially more secure and less likely to be reliant on services.
I would even go as far as to challenge the federal government to set a 100% employment goal, at least until the economy recovers. In the last great economic decline, one of the things that pulled us out was the creation of our beautiful and great infrastructure and park lands. Sadly, we’ve done little to maintain and modernize our infrastructure over the years, and especially during our recent Age of Prosperity. Instead of Senators and Representatives pushing for infrastructure projects in their districts they have settled for pork barrel projects, many of which have never broken earth, yet scored huge political points (and donations) for the politicians involved.
If I were in a position to weigh in at the City of Olympia, for instance, I would suggest that the city, during the next few years, act as an incubator for housing and other construction projects with the condition that 90% of the jobs created by each project be local hires. I think this would go a lot farther than a shotgun distribution of limited funds to random non-profit organizations, because it would address joblessness, which is a root cause of poverty, as opposed to treating symptoms of poverty such as hunger and homelessness.
So this is my take on the question, I look forward to hearing from others.
Check out this video from The Huffington Post that sheds some light on what we could face here in Olympia in the coming years if we aren’t careful about commercial development.
This week the council voted 4-3 to NOT choose a developer for a parking garage in Downtown Olympia, and instead committed to increasing surface parking capacity by 200 spots. The new 70 stall parking lot opened for the holidays is a step toward that 200, if they make it permanent.
The general feeling I get is that this was a good decision made for the right reasons. Joe Hyer talked about other developments, Colpitts’ for example, that are having trouble putting all of the pieces together to secure project funding. Colpitts has their long term funding secure, and is looking for startup money.
The major case against a parking garage right now is of course, the economy. Another might be a question of capacity. We already have over 600,000 square feet of ground level parking downtown, so, some wonder, why build a garage? The answer to that is that we have to build up on that street level parking and when we do, perhaps not yet, but within the next ten years, we’re going to need a parking structure to accommodate increased population downtown.
I don’t think it’s worth having a big fight over, because I think a parking garage is an eventuality, meaning there’s really not much to be done to stop it. Someday a developer is going to make a garage pencil out, and then they will build it, and there will be nothing, beyond design review, that we will be able to do about it.
This is why it’s important that we get involved in the Comprehensive Plan process over the next two years. Through that process we can come up with measured goals around growth and development and get ourselves out of this collective pendulous state we’ve found ourselves stuck in, ultimately getting us no where toward our goals.
Olympia drops plan for garage – South Sound – The Olympian – Olympia, Washington.
My friend Nicole is building up her doula business, Red Raspberry Doula. She studied to become a doula at Evergreen, and is one of the most caring and compassionate people I know. Tell your friends!
Nicole Heye
Emmett’s talking about it on Olympia Time.
Roxanne is talking about it on Everyday Olympia.
So, I figured I should at least beat Olyblog and The Olympian to it and weigh in on Olympia’s newest print media venture, Olympia Power & Light.
Having known it’s creators, Meta Hogan and Matthew Green, for many years now in different capacities I have no reservations about their combined ability to create a provocative, well written, and visually inspiring newspaper. The vacuum create by the death of Terry Knight’s ‘Sitting Duck’ should give them an instant base looking for a print alternative to The Olympian.
Having not seen their business plan, nor spoken to them about how they plan to fund the project, I can’t really speak to the business side, though I do wonder how they will manage to start a business like this in the middle of a recession while giant print newspapers are closing up shop around us.
That said, I can’t wait to see the first issue, which is sure to contain unctuously written articles that I will no doubt savor and enjoy.
Congrats and good luck to Meta and Matthew.
Please do not be alarmed.
A recent post on Emmett O’Connell’s blog prompted me to email Karen Veldheer and ask for clarification on the assumptions I was forming based on Veldheer’s church’s (Orthodox Presbyterian) beliefs regarding LGBT persons, mainly that the lifestyle is a sin. The following are my questions and her response, unedited.
Rob Richards:
1. How do you feel about the city’s equal benefits policy?
2. Do you support full civil rights for minorities, including
GLBT?
Karen Veldheer:
I believe in the separation of Church and State, and that city ordinances must be supported by elected leaders. I support the City of Olympia’s equal benefits policy. Regarding civil rights for minorities, including GLBT, the State of Washington has over 200 specific rights including many of the rights most important to GLBT which I support as well.
———————–
I did ask a couple of clarifying follow up questions which I will post when I receive a response.
My reaction to this so far?
In her answer above, the second sentence, as written, says that she supports the EBO. The first sentence makes me wonder what she means by that. My take on this response is that Veldheer believes that elected officials should uphold the law, the EBO is the law, and so she supports it. The problem I have with that answer is that it doesn’t speak to her personal values around the issue, for instance, would she support repealing it if a campaign were launched to do so? What are her personal experiences around this? I’m left wondering many things.
She also doesn’t put any kind of emotional emphasis into this response, it ends up feeling a bit canned, like a lawyer wrote it, and she doesn’t convince me that she has thought much about gay rights.
Now, as rough as that may sound, I really do hope that this can be an honest and open dialog where we clear up misconceptions and fix bad assumptions, where we can learn about and from one another. These local elections are too important to ignore, and we have to be informed about who is on the ballot. Too much is happening, and too much growth is about to happen in Olympia for us to go blindly into the ballot box.
