28 November 2024 — In years gone by, when I lived in the U.S., Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. I’d make it a 4-day break-in-my-routine and re-ground myself. Read, long walks, etc.
But now, for the last 25 years (and counting) Europe has been my home. Christmas has become “my” holiday mostly due to my wife’s long-time family Christmas traditions (she was born and raised in Europe) which are many, and varied. She makes it a 10-day holiday with family and friends. I still re-ground myself – but for a deliciously longer period of time.
Today my American friends and colleagues celebrate their Thanksgiving and I send them the very warmest wishes, for what I have long defined as the most common of human desires: to be safe, along with your family, with food to eat – and dreams of a robust future.
But as we look around the world, these wishes are far more heartfelt than we can imagine, knowing none of those things are possible for the greatest percentage of humanity on this pathetic planet.
Because that is the most telling part. Thanksgiving is, at its core, a harvest holiday. A time to celebrate the reaping of the bounty Earth has provided. Other cultures around the world have similar celebrations, and for good reason. For much of human history, there was an immediate connection between how much food could be gathered before winter’s desolation and the prospects for survival. Fall was a time for thanks, but also of fear – if the harvest came up short.
Today, most of us (in the West, at least) live far removed from the land. And fears of privation, if not outright starvation, are remote to the point of being nonexistent. For those of us who will sit down to sumptuous dinner tables today, there are other fears and sadnesses that will accompany the revelry. We can’t help but worry about our collective future. We think of those who find themselves in war zones around the globe – mourning, under bombardment, fleeing their homes. We think of those being persecuted for their ethnic and cultural background, their religion, or whom they love.
Because we shake our heads in exasperation at the capacity of our species to be heartless and to do evil. We breathe deeply, aching for people in a distant place we will never visit – but whom we recognize because of our common bonds as humans.
It is often times a weird holiday. Thanksgiving is arguably the most celebrated, revered, and complicated secular holiday in the United States. Sure, there are other American holidays, such as the Fourth of July, Labor and Memorial Days. But nothing rivals the size of these Turkey Day feasts, the scale of the travel, and the joy and angst that can come from family gatherings at Thanksgiving. Especially after such a calm Presidential election year 😖
And as with several American traditions, the holiday is aspirational. The story most of us learned as children growing up in America – of the “first Thanksgiving,” where Pilgrims and Native Americans broke bread in a time of peril – is an exercise in myth-making. As adults, we would learn that so much of American “history” was just myth. The facts of that fateful time were, of course, far more complicated. And what followed between Native Peoples and those who would go on to found the United States would be a tragedy of epic proportions. It was just as the phrase “all men are created equal” was written at a time when slavery (among other grave injustices) had a bloody grip on the nation.
So here we sit – hardly in an age of tranquility. Far from it. We live in an anxious time. Some days, it can feel like the wheels are coming off and the planet is careening out of control. “Thanks” and “gratitude” are in very short supply. And it is not just that I am a life-long incurable skeptic and cynic – I can be an optimist when it is warranted – but that I am a realist.
Myriad crises ricochet across our newsfeeds and disturb our conscience. Some are immediate and others endemic. Wherever we seem to turn, we see pain, danger, and disorientation. Edifices we once turned to for stability — our democratic governance, a largely peaceful world order, basic notions of truth — are collapsing, buckling. Will they ultimately crumble? And if they do, what waves of chaos and heartbreak will they unleash?
In addition to all that ails us in the broader world, many of you undoubtedly can add personal afflictions and ones that strike your family and friends. These include struggles of health, financial stability, loneliness, and hopelessness.
Granted, this era is the most brutal of times. We are living through social and technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution – but it is occurring in only a fraction of the time. What we are experiencing today – the breakdown of all existing authority, primarily but not exclusively governmental – is if not a predictable result, at least an unsurprising one. All of these other features are just the localized spikes on the longer sine wave of history.
It is hard to accept that there is nothing inevitable about democracy, that there is nothing inevitable about stability. For all the success that democracies have had over the past century or more, they are mere blips in history. In the short history of mankind, no *democracy*, no *republic* has survived as such.
Nope. Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance. The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible.
But these ideals are far more fragile than we believe. Their success in the 20th century depended on unique political and social conditions that now have proved ephemeral. And in 2025 Americans (and the rest of us) are going to see how ephemeral those conditions were.
Because we know from our history – the oh, so, incredibly short history of humanity on this planet – that moments of peril do not always get resolved. And sometimes the cost of resolution can be high – measured in high human suffering.
But I still read and write and – dare I say it – dream. I don’t think it’s completely hopeless to attempt to create a dialogue, however imperfect or incomplete, between the various branches of knowledge effecting and affecting our current state of horror. It is my attempt, in our age of folly, our age of bewilderment, as the world moves from pandemic to protest to war and back again, to deal with a time of sickness and scoundrels.
So in a somewhat backhanded way I am giving “thanks” to all of you, my readers. All 28,000+ strong of you. As we try to create a dialogue, given so many of you react to each of my posts with insightful replies, and suggest/inspire other posts, no matter how imperfect or incomplete that dialogue might be – to deal with our current state of horror.
To my American friends, Happy Thanksgiving Day. It is remarkable to remember how short the history of the United States really is. 248 years may seem like a lot – until you realize that it’s only about 3 lifetimes of 82 years. And for some of my readers 80 years is already in the rearview mirror. Bless you. I might waive your $ subscription fee for 2025. Maybe. Let me think on it.
But just think about the U.S. at its founding and what/where it is now. Oops. Bad comparison?
No. I am not becoming a softy. I am still a realist. As 2024 winds down and we look to the year ahead, there is little indication that these troublesome and dangerous trends will abate. If anything, they will likely intensify in the U.S. as it gallops toward a presidential administration whose DNA is embedded with peril. Wow, and I thought the last election was the most consequential in America’s history 🤦♂️
But America is a land that embraces and adapts to change, and you are a nation of change-makers. I do not intend to minimize the struggles you face. Nor what we face here in Europe, which also seems to be on the verge of disintegration.
So today Americans can celebrate, can relax – completely removed from the world. Sigmund Freud argued that in the human enterprise, anatomy is destiny. In the affairs of nations, geography – what it wills, demands, and bestows – is destiny, too.
It can’t explain everything, to be sure. Britain and Japan are both island nations. That might explain their reliance on naval power and even their imperial aspirations.
But what accounts for their fundamentally different histories? Other factors are clearly at play, including culture, religion, and what nature bestows or denies in resources. Fortune, along with the random circumstances it brings, pushes them in different directions.
Still, if I had to identify that one thing that – more than any other – helps explain the way Americans see the world, is divorced from the world, it would be America’s physical location. It’s like the real estate business: it’s all about location, location, location.
As I have noted before, the United States is the only great power in the history of the world that has had the luxury of having non-predatory neighbors to its north and south, and fish to its east and west. The two oceans to either side of the country are what U.S. historian Thomas Bailey brilliantly described as “its liquid assets”. Canadians, Mexicans, and fish. That trio of neighbors has given the United States an unprecedented degree of security, a huge margin for error in international affairs – and the luxury of largely unfettered development.
From the earliest days of the country’s founding, geography has been much more its ally than adversary. Oh, American might disintegrate from within. But its borders are secure. Oh, wait a minute. Is that Vladimir Putin sitting at Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving table?
But the cynic/skeptic/realist embedded within my soul knows you (we) have a very long way to go, in order to have a bucket of real hope.
So today I may not be at your Thanksgiving table with your family, but my prayers (and mind you this is coming from an agnostic) are with you, and with those suffering under the yoke of genocidal maniacs, authoritarians, thugs, criminals, oligarchs and more. Prayers for the victims of these immoral thugs to strengthen their resilience.
And a special prayer will be for those fighting the good fight (futile as it might be), trying to reset the path our world is on, so that it serves humanity, not the needs of those who brutalize humanity and our planet.
Every tiny step forward, by every human being … matters.
And this is coming from a curmudgeon.
