What are You Thankful For?

Published by Terrance Ó Dhomnaill in General · Thursday 28 Nov 2024 · 11:45
Tags: thankful, Crann, na, beatha, thanksgiving, puritans, poverty, homelessness

I read Bruce Coulter’s blog piece “When You’re Down, It’s Not Easy Being Thankful” this morning and thought about it all day.

What should we be thankful for today? I spent my morning catching up on the news of the world that I missed while I was out working this week and it is dire.

The United States government ( I specify government because they haven’t asked us if we want to start world war three), is pushing the western world ever closer to a major confrontation in Ukraine. After reading the news from Russia and eastern Europe, it is plain that the Russians don’t want that either.

Israel’s Netanyahu, has agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon while bombing and firing artillery rounds into southern Lebanon. So much for the ceasefire.

In the U.S, life goes on as normally as can be as the whole world is on pins and needles trying to figure out what the new Mafia Don is going to actually do starting at the end of January. He, his new cabinet picks, and his admin people are hitting the talk shows and news interviews hard, talking up the mass deportation of all of the illegal immigrants, stopping the wars by escalating the wars, and starting tariff trade wars with every other country in the world.

Meanwhile, Americans from the middle class to the wealthy elites are sitting around dining room tables this afternoon, eating a feast of traditional turkey with spicy stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, vegetables, fresh bread and any other goodies their money can buy. A day off from all of the chaos around the world.

Because the U.S. is the only country that celebrates this holiday on the last Thursday of November, the rest of the world is carrying on with whatever they would normally be doing on this day, such as: scrounging for food and shelter in Gaza as it has started raining there, returning to bombed out homes in southern Lebanon, dying in frozen foxholes and slit trenches in the Donbas and Kursk or enduring mass power outages as Russian air strikes take out the Ukrainian power grid.

The Africans in the Sahel and Sudan are thankful for another day above ground in between dodging roving militias and scrounging for food, water and shelter.

In the United States, there are close to (and this may be an underestimate) 800,000 homeless people living on the streets, in their cars, in ratty motor homes, and in shelters that are little better than open air prisons in some cases. What do these people have to be thankful for on Thanksgiving 2024?

They are not much different than the people in Ukraine, Palestine and Africa in that they are thankful to be alive for another day.

Some of these homeless people have jobs that doesn’t give them a living wage in the place they are living. Some are disabled and cannot work anymore. Some are disabled veterans who were discarded by society when they returned home after fighting for American imperialism abroad. No matter what circumstances put them on the streets of the United States, they are everywhere if we care to look around.

They are in my little suburban town where I live. I see them sometimes whenever I go to the grocery store. I wish I could help them more but I don’t have the resources and with my own PTSD issues from my own trips abroad to fight for the empire, I can’t afford to get too involved in individual people’s lives as I have enough trouble managing my own.

It also doesn’t help that the narrative about this holiday is false to begin with. If anyone were to do a deep dive into what really happened when the religious extremists set up their little colony in Plymouth Rock, they would see that the likelihood of a communal dinner between the starving Puritan/Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag tribe nearby may have been a little different than the histories present.

I have no doubt that the local village may have brought the starving colonists some venison, maybe some turkeys, some maize corn and other local vegetables because most native Americans were pretty charitable people with regard to others. Seeing the handful of white skinned people starving would have triggered that charitable sense and since there were only a few men, and only a handful of those that looked like they might be warriors, they probably seemed pretty harmless overall at the time. In the real history archives, the Puritans were starving by then and had just experienced their first successful harvest.

Little did they know. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to American history if the local native tribes had killed them or let them starve? I doubt it would have changed things too much as the Europeans were already all over the place in the Americas. The English would have arrived eventually no matter what and committed genocide against the native Americans anyway. It just might have started a little later on in the continents history.

My wife and I had a quiet dinner this afternoon consisting of lamb ribs, vegetables and french baguettes. A little apple champagne (non-alcoholic), and some cheesecake with berries on top. We don’t care for turkey, although I have eaten my share of traditional Thanksgiving fare through the years.

I ate these traditional meals as a kid when my late mother would put on a spread, even when we couldn’t rub two nickels together. Back then, we grew or hunted everything she would put on the table. When she could afford it, we would have some turkey.

When we couldn’t afford to go to the grocery store for a turkey, our traditional meal might be chicken, venison or beef from one of our slaughtered cows. Vegetables from the extensive gardens, and homemade desserts made from pumpkins or blue hubbard squashes, and cookies with berries picked from the fields and woods around our farm.

We may have been dirt poor but we were never hungry.

After leaving home for the military, I ate these traditional meals in many military chow halls all over the world. I wasn’t always able to get to one of these eateries but when I did, it was almost always the same meal year after year.

Slices of dried turkey meat, some dried stuffing, mashed potatoes, canned vegetables, some cranberry sauce, and some kind of dessert. Maybe pumpkin pie or cookies, depending on where I was.

After my career in the military, I moved close to my late mother’s house. My late father had passed many years before that. Every year, I would spend my thanksgivings with her eating traditional meals of……

You guessed it, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, canned vegetables, mashed potatoes and a dessert. Usually pumpkin pie with either whipped topping or vanilla ice cream. Sometimes she would have apple pie.

My wife, who is from China, had never experienced American traditional holidays before she met me. When I met her, she expressed to me an interest in experiencing all things American in her efforts to become a good American.

On our first real Thanksgiving together several years ago, we had just moved to central Texas and I didn’t feel like cooking a traditional meal for just the two of us. We opted to eat out at a restaurant so she could experience a traditional Thanksgiving meal.

I made the mistake of taking her to a Golden Corral late in the afternoon. The place looked like someone had detonated an explosive device around the buffet serving area and my wife was horrified, to say the least. We tried to eat something but she quickly told me that she really disliked the taste of turkey and we haven’t eaten any since. That was back in 2015.

After that, we have always sat down to enjoy a meal consisting of something we like to eat. Sometimes it might be dishes from northern China that she likes to cook, or I may make something European that we have learned to like (and no, it’s not Italian).

But never, ever, will we cook turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, canned vegetables, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.

Does this make us unamerican? Maybe. But we don’t care. For us, it’s not about what we make to eat on Thanksgiving but what the true meaning of the holiday is about.

We believe that this holiday is a day to reflect on the things we are thankful for in our lives. A nice roof over our heads, clothes to wear, food to eat and family to call and wish the same for them. Our children are all grown up with children of their own and they all live out of state. Way out of state.

Since they all live so far away, Wechat and Facetime have to do until we can get together, which isn’t very often. Gone are the days of families living nearby and spending holidays together. There are families that still traditionally live close to each other but that has become fewer and fewer nowadays as the young people migrate for better jobs. The wealthier among us fly, or drive to grandma’s house for the end of the year holidays.

Those not so fortunate to be able to spend money on holiday traveling, spend the time with their immediate families or best friends (who like to watch college football on your big screen TV). For those like me with families spread out across the country, I might get to talk to my kids and grandkids this evening by phone, if I am fortunate.

Given how bad plane travel is these days, who would want to fight the masses of people and cancelled holiday flights in the U.S. anyway? Just the thought of being stuck in a crowded airport somewhere makes me shudder. I am content to stay home and have a quiet day. I say quiet because I hate watching U.S. football on the TV so we go for walks and listen to our shows on the internet. I will put something on NetFlix later tonight.

I know, I can hear the critics now. “What, you don’t watch the Macy’s parade or football on the telly? That’s unamerican.”

All of us have something to be thankful for and today is the traditional American day to express those feelings out loud. Even if it’s just the ability to tell yourself, “I am alive and surviving another day. I will worry about tomorrow when the sun comes up and I can put both feet on the floor/ground. After that, I will see what the day brings with the rising sun.”

Be thankful for what you have in life. Even if it’s just the clothes on your back and shoes on your feet. I have at times in my life, been thankful for these small things. I have lived at times, very close to homelessness or imminent death on a foreign battlefield. I always promised myself that if I got out of my dire situation, I would never let it happen again, until it did.

You never know what may happen to you in life. We live in dire times with freak hurricanes and tornadoes that devastate communities and regions that have never experienced such things before. We live in uncertain economic times when the job you have, that is just barely paying a living wage, disappears due to a corporate buyout or mismanagement causing a closure. Now, you are one step away from homelessness or maybe you are now homeless once that job is gone.

Be thankful that you are still breathing and can put one foot in front of the other. That is all a body needs in order to find food and shelter, and with a bit of luck, another job. My youngest son just experienced this and I talked him through it after he had a panic attack.

On this Thanksgiving holiday 2024, say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity you wish. I know I am very thankful for my life right now with little dog napping on the couch next to me while I write this and I get to watch my wife doing some kind of dancing exercise in the family room after a nice dinner of lamb ribs and vegetables. I am thankful that I struggled and sacrificed so much in my younger life so that they can live the life they enjoy now free of worry about the basics. At least for now.

But that is a worry for tomorrow. As my late grandad told me once upon a time, “If you can wake up in the morning and put both feet on the floor, the rest of the day is downhill from there.”

Sláinte

Post sources:

What Are You Thankful For?: https://medium.com/open-microphone/what-are-you-thankful-for-6e6ed99a3454

There are no reviews yet.