Despite my daily meditation practice, which includes listing one thing I’m grateful for each day, I have an ambivalent relationship with gratitude. It often feels unsettling to focus on the abundant amount of privilege I have–health, relationships, financial security–when so many others have more challenges in their lives. And while I do understand the benefits of centering gratitude in both the big and small moments, I worry about focusing on it too much, to the point where I’m less motivated to do what I can to make the world a better place for others.
Dtobias, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
But today is Thanksgiving, a day we’re directed to give some attention to gratitude. For me, no Thanksgiving is complete without listening to Alice’s Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie’s classic song about how he manages to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War by embellishing the story of his arrest for littering on a Thanksgiving Day 60 years ago. I feel grateful for Arlo: his irreverence, creativity and dry humor in a somber situation. I’ve just returned from Vietnam, where I visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, and saw many of the horrors close up: the countless bombs, the generations of disfigurement and health challenges from Agent Orange, the My Lai Massacre, the number of people dead on both sides.
The question weighed on me as it often does–Why do people do this sh*t to each other? What is it in the human psyche that wires us toward committing acts of cruelty that go far beyond the battlefield–as if the battlefield isn’t horrific enough. What makes it ok to shoot children, rape, torture and kill innocent civilians? I’m not just talking about the Vietnam War. These atrocities permeate all borders and all countries, stretching from ancient times to the present.
And in the wake of this, what does it mean to draw a faux border around our own Thanksgiving tables, shutting it all out? And how do we reconcile this time of gratitude with our genocidal history against Native Americans, many of whom mark this day as a time of mourning? My younger child has boycotted Thanksgiving for the past two years in order to attend their yearly protest in Plymouth. I am grateful for their activism, even though I’m not personally ready to abandon Thanksgiving, yet. But I think we need to see the holiday as aspirational, rather than celebratory. We can be thankful for the blessings in our lives, but we also need to address the holes and shadows in a tableau that falsely centers on the horn of plenty.
I’m not trying to make Thanksgiving a downer. I’m looking forward to our family cooking extravaganza, and time around the table, and pumpkin pie. And while I’m grateful for the many blessings in my personal life, I’m feeling even more grateful to the people who are following Arlo’s footsteps in being creatively subversive in not accepting the status quo: the dancing frogs in Portland, the whistle blowing in Chicago, the moms in Charlotte arranging transportation and food drop offs for immigrant families so that parents did not have to risk their safety.
As Arlo says, “…fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may think it’s a movement.” Today I’m grateful to all who have comprised this movement by taking actions in the last year to make life better for those endangered and at risk: whether that was protesting, donating money to people in need, writing letters to elected officials, having a difficult conversation with someone with an alternative point of view, or engaging in any small (or large) act of kindness.
Happy Thanksgiving!