Build a Longer Table

 

 

First, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. It’s an opportunity for us to give thanks as well as to celebrate Indigenous peoples. And to extol our common good — the ideals that bind us together, rather than the xenophobia, racism, and misogyny that pull us apart. 

The Thanksgiving holiday is also an opportunity to become reenergized for the historic fight we face in coming months, when the anti-democracy forces of neofascism and bigotry seek to take over America. 

Please try to avoid two large traps that some people are already falling into: 

Denial. Some don’t want to accept that these anti-democracy forces are significant and growing, that Donald Trump has a realistic chance of being reelected president notwithstanding his attempted coup and upcoming criminal trials, and that if he succeeds, everything we believe in will be seriously threatened. 

But unless we see this for what it is, we cannot possibly summon the energy and determination necessary to stop Trumpist neofascism. 

Robert Reich.

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/a-time-to-give-thanks-and-be-reenergized?

 

Thanksgiving- a troubled legacy

by Tim Weed,
In 1620, searching for a place to practice their dissident religion in peace, a small group of English separatists sailed to the wilderness coast of America. They were helped by local Indians, who shared with them a great feast comprised of native foods: turkey, cornbread, pumpkin, cranberries. The Indians taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn and squash together with a fish placed in the soil to encourage robust growth; the colony survived and prospered. Jump cut to the Boston Tea Party, Concord and Lexington, and the modern world’s first successful experiment in democracy.

If you add the Salem Witch trails and the French and Indian War, this summary pretty much covers the average American’s vision of the century and a half that passed between the landing at Plymouth Rock and the fireworks of July 4, 1776. It’s what might be called the Thanksgiving Myth — and it’s not wildly off base as far as it goes. But some important context is missing. This is a problem, because a nation’s foundational mythology determines its self-image and deeply affects the behavior of its government and citizenry.
From 1616 to 1619, a series of virgin-soil epidemics spread by European trading vessels ravaged the New England seaboard, wiping out up to 95 percent of the Algonkian-speaking native population from Maine to Narragansett Bay. The coast was a vast killing zone of abandoned agricultural fields and decimated villages littered with piles of bones and skulls. This is what the Pilgrims encountered when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Not a pristine wilderness, but the devastated ruins of a once-thriving culture, a haunting boneyard which English libertine Thomas Morton later described as a “newfound Golgotha.”
The collision of worldviews is almost impossible to imagine. On the one hand, a European society full of religious fervor and colonizing energy; on the other, a native society shattered and reeling from the greatest catastrophe it had ever known. The Puritans were forever examining their own spiritual state. Having come to America with the goal of separating themselves from polluted forms of worship, a great deal of their energy was focused on battling demons, both within themselves and at large in the world. Puritan clerics confused the Indian deity Kiehtan with God, and they conflated Hobbamock, a fearsome nocturnal spirit associated with Indian shamans, or powwows, with Satan. Because of this special connection many Puritans believed that the powwows, and by extension all the New England Indians, were bound by a covenant with the devil. Indians thus became symbolic adversaries, their very existence a threat to the Englishmen’s prized religious identities.