Happy Thanksgiving!

11-28-19

       Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.  It is a day focused on food, family and football, without the baggage of religiosity or crass materialism that can sully Christmas.   Yet Thanksgiving has a messy history. The first Thanksgiving in 1621 was more a moment of detente between temporary allies, than a celebration of beloved community.  Far from being a prelude to the establishment of a new society marked by multicultural democracy, it was the comma before the continuation of a campaign of colonization and genocide, (Source:  “The Invention of Thanksgiving,” by Phillip Deloria, The New Yorker, 11/18/19, h/t Marcia Smith).

      We have papered over that messy history with a comforting myth, pretending that we have absorbed all of our differences into a beautiful mosaic. We avert our eyes from the violence and subjugation in our history in our pathological need to cling to unearned innocence.  Our steadfast refusal to grapple with the truth of our history has brought us to this frightening precipice.

    We have a bile-spewing, corrupt and narcissistic moron in charge of the nuclear codes, propped up by a cabal of truly evil men who seek to hasten the death of our republic and feast on the corpse.  Trump is too busy cozying up to autocrats and partying with war criminals to even give lip service to American ideals.

      In such an environment,  it may seem futile to try to think of what we, as a nation, have to be thankful for.  While we should never minimize the enormity of the threat our democracy faces, we should be thankful that the Democratic majority we worked to elect in 2018 elevated people like the late, great Elijah Cummings, Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff to finally begin to hold Trump accountable.  We should be thankful for the parade of previously anonymous public servants willing to testify in open hearings about the wrongs they witnessed, from Lt. Col. Alex Vindman to Marie Yovanovitch to Dr. Fiona Hill. Most of all, we should be thankful for the whistleblower, who risked his or her career and personal safety to expose Trump’s malfeasance.

        We should be thankful for judges who understand  that they are a separate, co-equal branch of government and use their authority to block Trump’s unconstitutional abuses of power—judges like U.S. District Judge Michael Simon, who prevented the implementation of a Trump order that was projected to cut legal immigration by 65%, or like Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who ruled that Don McGahn could not rely on executive privilege to completely avoid testifying in Congress.

      Most of all, we should be grateful for each other, who protested, contacted voters, wrote amicus briefs or contributed to Fair Fight 2020 or the ACLU or RAICES, who said with our time or our money that we will not accept what is being done in our names.  We are democracy’s best hope and we should remember that cynicism and fear are the allies of autocracy. I am thankful for each one of you. Happy Thanksgiving!