Giving thanks at Thanksgiving dinner continues as an ingrained ritual. At some holiday tables, those present state in turn what makes them most thankful. At others, the most senior member gives a Thanksgiving prayer. In most cases, that is about as far as reflection on the meaning of this peculiar American holiday goes. Nobody mentions, of course, its historical origins in continental conquest and racist extermination. Only the mythical feast with natives helping colonists to survive is affirmed.
This season of giving thanks, I look at the headlines on Trumpist subservience to the barbarian brutality of a Saudi tyrant. I examine analyses of overwhelming evidence of climate chaos and its accelerating risks to national security and international stability stridently denied by the highest authorities. I struggle to find something of major importance for which I can feel genuine in giving thanks. We live in desperately dangerous if uncomfortably interesting times.
No Thank You
Around the world, I see the rise of authoritarian dictators (Brazil, Philippines, Eastern Europe, etc.) who brag of their history of assassinations and parallel future intentions. No thank you.
In the U.S., we have elected a megalomaniacal narcissistic would-be dictator, who is steadily gaining more power by demagoguery and pandering to the demands of the super-rich. No thank you.
The “administration” released the latest U.S. climate assessment report by a team of more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee on Black Friday, hoping to bury it in a no-news day. Drawing on resources of multiple government agencies, the report forecasts massive economic and health costs of growing climate chaos. These are imminent catastrophic consequences if our government continues to deny facts. Meanwhile, the Trumpists pursue a policy of destroying the minor federal efforts so far taken to mitigate catastrophic climate change. No thank you.
Not long before Thanksgiving, I read the brilliant and frightening small book, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, by Dutch philosopher Rob Riemen. He describes the current resurgence of fascism in Europe. His list of neo-fascist tendencies strikingly parallels what we observe right here in Trumplandia today. No thank you.
I note the continuing concentration of income and wealth among the 1% of the 1% of the richest Americans and corporations. Its correlation with the destruction of the middle class and the expansion and intensification of poverty among the rest of us is not coincidental. No thank you.
I read of the growing auto-loan debt, credit card debt, corporate debt, and government debt. These threats to economic stability result from extreme income tax cuts for the super-rich and the systematic concentration of wealth and income in recent years. The risk of societal collapse that such greed portends is also extreme. No thank you.
I know that the decline of community in America has a long continuing history that parallels the rise of the corporate state. The currently exploding opioid-addiction epidemic reflects a crescendo in that trend, due to the alienation of American institutions from their claimed purposes. Like mass incarceration, it results from “health care” and “law enforcement” institutions serving themselves, not the public interest. No thank you.
Creating Grounds for Giving Thanks
Of course, the list goes on. Giving thanks inevitably seems to require us to look to our immediate families, friends, and neighbors. All indicators suggest that we must strengthen our local communities to counter the global trends that otherwise seem insurmountable as well as extremely destructive.
Giving thanks will truly mean something when we take back control of our lives by turning away from the oppressive institutions and culture of the global “technosphere.” Politics must become local again and drive decisions that will enhance rather than destroy life on planet Earth. Then giving thanks will have resulted from putting human values ahead of the demands of the machine.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 