“Thanksgiving!” my friend snorted. “For what?”
He didn’t mean it, but I knew what he meant. He was a good enough friend to utter such heresy in my hearing. In America this day gratitude is obligatory, felt or not. Not to give thanks is the familial equivalent of “taking the knee” before a football game. No, I’m not proud to be an American, I’m stuck – in a nation that sucks!
Never have I felt less hopeful about the American experiment. Thanksgiving celebrates the commencement of that experiment – from the newcomers’ perspective. A grumpy group of zealots believed enough in their unpopular faith to flee their safe native land for a dangerous wilderness. These pilgrims were not forced to emigrate, they chose to, so they could worship freely. Unwilling to “give a little and get along” or even “render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s”, they would be free, dammit, whatever the hardship, like many another cult before and since. You and I would not have enjoyed their monotonous conversation or suffocating embrace. We’d have resented having every thought prescribed. But we’d have admired the guts of these wingnuts. Which of us would sacrifice everything – home, friends, security, familiarity, comfort – for an ideal?
The prosperous gents who gathered in Philadelphia less than two centuries later to defend and define their independence were a more urbane and amenable lot. They could differ and joke. But they too were willing to risk all for an idea. They walked the walk, not just talked the talk of freedom. Imagine: if they’d failed, we’d all have been Canadians!
What’s the big idea that excites Americans today and lights us on our way? Faith in all our institutions – government, law, the press, education, religion, the military, even science – melts like butter in the tropics. We caterwaul and decry, we do not converse. On either side of our national divide, today’s groaning boards will be groaning. Yeh, we’re grateful, we guess, but we feel like crap.
How do we turn our nation’s frown upside down? How do we reclaim the fervor that animated our forebears? We yearn to pledge allegiance, but to what?
Our misery, I’d argue, is moral, not practical. We’re in a funk, not a pickle. We’re kicking the cat, only the cat’s our neighbor and the kicking hurts.
The therapy for depression, I know from personal experience, includes counseling, drugs, exercise, and commitment to some communal cause, it scarcely matters what. During my first bout, I registered with our local hospital to condole with lonely patients. It would have been good for me. Dread of this activity may have hastened my recovery. No nurse Nightingale I.
What will jolt America back to decency, amity, defensible direction? A good talking to and a good scare. From pulpits, podia, soapboxes, we need to be chastised. No, it is not OK to lie, cheat, slander, berate, mislead – the idea! Now is no time for coaxing; we need to be kicked into common sense. Would you really prefer to live in Russia, Hungary, China? Really? Just think: almost two years to eject a flagrant fraudster from Congress! Really?
I shudder to predict the scare. Foreign attack, disease, asteroid, an assassin’s weapon? An oh-shit moment that shakes us back to an awareness that life is a communal endeavor, we need each other and, in Ben Franklin’s formulation, either we hang together or hang separately.
The worst events in my life I account among my best, for they wakened, strengthened, humbled me, made me less a dope. This Thanksgiving I’ll be praying for pain enough to cure, but not to kill.