Tag: thanksgiving
Why We Should Still Be Giving Thanks

Why We Should Still Be Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. But there is something almost un-American about it. It is a day opposed to striving, to getting more. We stop adding up the numbers on the scorecard of life. We freeze in place and give thanks for whatever is there.

The Wall Street Journal once featured sob stories about failed dot-com entrepreneurs. People still in their twenties and thirties spoke painfully of their disappointments. They had planned to make many millions on internet startups, but the dot-com market crashed before they could pile up the first seven figures.

One 29-year-old had joined a new company that paid "only" $38,000 a year (about $64,000 in today's dollars). His business school classmates were averaging $120,000 at traditional firms. Others talked of working outrageously long hours. When their dot-com closed its doors, they had little personal life to fall back on.

Our culture does not encourage contentment with what we have. This is the land of the upgrade. One can always do better, be it with house or spouse. When money is the measurement, the competitive struggle can never end without acknowledging some kind of defeat. Everyone other than Elon Musk has someone who is ahead.

Messages in the media continually tweak Americans' innate sense of inadequacy. Our folk hero is the college dropout who sells his tech company for $2 billion by the age of 26. How is a middle-aged guy making $65,000 a year supposed to feel about that?

Some years back, an investment company ran an ad showing a young woman sitting pensively on a front porch. "Your grandfather did better than his father," it read. "Your father did better than his father. Are you prepared to carry on the tradition?"

Note the use of the respectable word "tradition" on what's really a call for intergenerational competition. It suggests that failure to amass more wealth than one's parents is a threat to the family's honor.

So what if the next generation isn't so rich as the previous one? The way most of our younger people live would be the envy of 95 percent of the earth's inhabitants.

Such thinking would have been wholly foreign to the Pilgrims celebrating the "first Thanksgiving." The Pilgrims traded all the comforts of England to worship as they chose. Their ship, the Mayflower, landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1620. They held the "first Thanksgiving" the following autumn.

Mid-December is an awful time to set up shop in the New England wilderness. Disease immediately carried off more than half of the 102 colonists. They are buried on Coles Hill, right across the street from Plymouth Rock. Without the help of the Wampanoag Indians, the colony would have vanished altogether.

Things got better by 1625, prompting the colony's governor, William Bradford, to write that the Pilgrims "never felt the sweetness of the country till this year." But that hadn't stopped them from giving thanks four years earlier. The purpose was not to celebrate the good life but to celebrate their staying alive. The natives shared in the feast.

By the 1830s, America was already a bustling land of fortune building and material lust. Intellectuals of the day looked back nostalgically at the Puritan concern with unworldly matters. Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the Pilgrims' religious orientation as "an antidote to the spirit of commerce and of economy."

Thanksgiving is a throwback to that misty past. It requires a Zen-like acceptance of the present and what is. Gratitude is the order of the day.

This is a full-glass holiday. To be healthy, educated and living in America is to have one's cup running over. For that, let us give thanks.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

thanksgiving

Gratitude And Grace, Even Now

In the throes of a global pandemic that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and will kill many more, it may be difficult to summon gratitude this Thanksgiving. Our sorrow and frustration are only intensified by a government that seems indifferent to the suffering and exacerbates suspicion and ill will at every opportunity.

And yet, on this day, even as the grim daily toll continues, we have many reasons — indeed, millions — to feel thankful. Personally, I am forever obliged to the friends and family who have helped me and mine stay safe this year.

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Dr. Scott Atlas

Atlas Urging Americans To Visit Elderly Since Holiday 'May Be Their Final One’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

President Donald Trump's highly controversial COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, is urging Americans to visit their elderly family members for Thanksgiving because it may be their final one. Atlas warns against isolation despite the coronavirus pandemic's near-exponential explosion.

"This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don't see your family at Thanksgiving," Atlas, a radiologist, not an epidemiologist, told Fox News Monday evening, as Media Matters reported.

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On Thanksgiving, Celebrate Agriculture — Not Agribusiness

On Thanksgiving, Celebrate Agriculture — Not Agribusiness

In December 1972, I was part of a nationwide campaign that came tantalizingly close to getting the U.S. Senate to reject Earl Butz, then-President Richard Nixon's choice for secretary of agriculture.

A coalition of grassroots farmers, consumers and scrappy public interest organizations (such as the Agribusiness Accountability Project that Susan DeMarco and I then headed) teamed up with some gutsy, unabashedly progressive senators to undertake the almost-impossible challenge of defeating the Cabinet nominee of a president who'd just been elected in a landslide.

The 51-44 Senate vote was so close because we were able to expose Butz as ... well, as butt-ugly — a shameless flack for big food corporations that gouge farmers and consumers alike. We brought the abusive power of corporate agribusiness into the public consciousness for the first time, but we had won only a moral victory, since there he was, ensconced in the seat of power. It horrified us that Nixon had been able to squeeze Butz into that seat, yet it turned out to be a blessing.

An arrogant, brusque, narrow-minded and dogmatic agricultural economist, Butz had risen to prominence in the small — but politically powerful — world of agriculture by devoting himself to the corporate takeover of the global food economy. He was dean of agriculture at Purdue University but also a paid board member of Ralston Purina and other agribusiness giants. In these roles, he openly promoted the preeminence of middleman food manufacturers over family farmers, whom he disdained.

"Agriculture is no longer a way of life," he infamously barked at them. "It's a business." He callously instructed farmers to "get big or get out" — and he then proceeded to shove tens of thousands of them out by promoting an export-based, conglomerated, industrialized, globalized, heavily subsidized, corporate-run food economy. "Adapt," he warned farmers, "or die." The ruination of farms and rural communities, Butz added, "releases people to do something useful in our society."

The whirling horror of Butz, however, spun off a blessing, which is that innovative, freethinking, populist-minded and rebellious small farmers and food artisans practically threw up at the resulting Twinkieization of America's food. They were sickened that nature's own rich contribution to human culture was being turned into just another plasticized product of corporate profiteers. "The central problem with modern industrial agriculture ... (is) not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste, and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all. More fundamentally, it has no soul," said Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and former farm boy from Yamhill, Oregon. Rather than accept that, they threw themselves into creating and sustaining a viable, democratic alternative. The "good food" rebellion has since sprouted, spread and blossomed from coast to coast.

This transformative grassroots movement rebuts old Earl's insistence that agriculture is nothing but a business. It most certainly is a business, but it's a good business — literally producing goodness — because it's "a way of life" for enterprising, very hardworking people who practice the art and science of cooperating with Mother Nature, rather than always trying to overwhelm her. These farmers don't want to be massive or make a killing; they want to farm and make delicious, healthy food products that help enrich the whole community.

This spirit was summed up in one simple word by a sustainable farmer in Ohio, who was asked what he'd be if he wasn't a farmer. He replied, "Disappointed." To farmers like these, food embodies our full "culture" — a word that is, after all, sculpted right into "agriculture" and is essential to its organic meaning.

Although agriculture has forestalled the total takeover of our food by crass agribusiness, the corporate powers and their political hirelings continue to press for the elimination of the food rebels and, ultimately, to impose the Butzian vision of complete corporatization. This is one of the most important populist struggles occurring in our society. It's literally a fight for control of our dinner, and it certainly deserves a major focus as you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner this year.

To find small-scale farmers, artisans, farmers markets and other resources in your area for everything from organic tomatoes to pastured turkey, visit the LocalHarvest website.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

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