Gathering for Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. How can we be thankful together, as families, as communities, as a nation? Thanksgiving, along with July 4th, is the foundational American holiday. It is more than bedrock: the holiday honors English speaking Europeans surviving and starting to take root on the Massachusetts shore of what would become the United States.

Thanksgiving. By definition giving thanks is plural, communal. It recognizes the others in the community, those we are showing appreciation for for the help they have given to us. We are thankful, thanking you for what you have provided to us.

This year many more of us will gather together, vaccinated or not, masked or not, infected or not. For many the panic and concern of the coronavirus pandemic has been calmed by the miracle and hard work of modern scientists who developed vaccines in record time, less than a year. Many others will venture out, traveling to family and friends across town or across the country, taking personal responsibility for their own health, which will often mean neither being vaccinated nor masked.

What is a nation of 333 million people to do? Perhaps the greatest gift of the Trump era is the start of an honest assessment of ourselves – or an unavoidable recognition of the deep divides of our society. From sea to shining sea people have willingly gravitated toward their heartfelt philosophical and value-based peers. The one common agreement seems to be there is great mistrust and lack of belief in the positions of the other side. A corollary is the futility of attempts to bridge the chasm.

The mask has been ripped off. We do not get along and we do not want to get along with those with whom we disagree.

There are increasingly two versions of life in the United States. People are for or against COVID-19 vaccinations. They believe or do not believe in climate change. Immigrants are overrunning our borders or reform is long overdue. Elections are fair or fraudulent. The one certainty is that people are certain of their position and that those opposing them are deeply wrong.

Perhaps a resolution is that there is no resolution. These are circles that cannot be squared. How do we get to together when we don’t want to be together? How can we be thankful for our past or this present moment when we do not share a common understanding of the conditions before us or the history that brought us to this day?

If in being honest with ourselves and each other we find mountains and deserts separate us and there is a lack of interest and will to either cross to the other side or help the other side cross over, that might be a good thing, the beginning of finding common ground in stating our lack of common interests.

If we do not recognize and define a common struggle and a shared, necessary path toward a solution, we cannot provide assistance or travel together toward public health or sustainability or mutual governance.

If national leaders and local neighbors have unrelenting versions of incompatible realities, maybe this is the holiday, the season and the year to stop forcing attempts at compatibility.

Rather than mouth pieties that we do not mean and will not follow, let us be grateful for those we do not agree with and cannot understand for the juxtaposition of their reality to ours.

That might be the start of a true, if separate, peace.