Thanksgiving is the most purely American holiday, but its meaning has never been absolute; over the years, the meaning of the holiday has always been taken from a historical context.
Its earliest context was as a Native American tradition of giving thanks for the harvest, which is why the first Thanksgiving we celebrate is not the Pilgrims inviting the Indians, but rather some 92 Wampanoags who brought much of the feast to the surviving 50 Pilgrims.
Colonial communities picked up the practice of giving thanks for the harvest, combining it with other celebrations like weddings. President George Washington used Thanksgiving to give thanks for a new nation and during the Civil War, Lincoln embraced Thanksgiving as a way to bring the nation together.
By the 1890s, there was a new objective for the Thanksgiving celebration – as a way to assimilate the waves of immigrants who were brought to America to provide manpower to build America’s booming, industrializing economy. They built upon that image of Pilgrims joining with natives, though in their interpretation, it was the superiority of the white settlers over the Indians who were invited to share the bounty.
A more accurate depiction would have shown the Pilgrims as immigrants to these shores, coming for opportunity and freedom, who were welcomed by the native Wampanoags, without whose help, the Pilgrims would have perished.
But with the immigrant-bashing of recent years, the moral of the Thanksgiving holiday changed yet again, to confer the legitimacy of European Christian domination over the native people, who only two generations removed from that 1621 harvest feast, were already engaged in ethnic cleansing, to kill, convert or remove the native peoples from the land they deemed was their divine right to possess.
Last year at this time, Congressman Gary Ackerman was pushing to get the DREAM Act through the lame duck Congress, which would have created a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children and who have only known the United States as their country. Big surprise, it was defeated, and instead, for much of this year, we have seen the most draconian, anti-American, unconstitutional laws aimed at terrorizing 19 million undocumented immigrants including nearly 5 million children who are actually American citizens, the worst in Alabama and Arizona.
This year’s Thanksgiving takes on a different theme in the context of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
Thanksgiving ushers in the season of giving, that time of the year that brings cheer to retailers because strapped consumers finally open their wallets. It’s Christmas, after all. The focus of every Hallmark special is how that poor child finally gets the Christmas gift of his wishes, that is, after the parent finds prayer.
The holiday season is that feel-good time of the year when there is ample opportunity for well-off people to get that euphoria of giving charity by well-off people who spend the rest of the year doing whatever it takes to grow their share no matter how destitute or disadvantaged others may be.
Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party queen, articulated it very well. After vowing to weaken social safety net programs such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits, Bachmann said that if you are not paying your own way, you should starve.
“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat,” she pronounced in Biblical tones.
In this context, Thanksgiving, has a completely different meaning from celebrating our cultural heritage mosaic and America’s melting pot, as Emma Lazarus expressed:
“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to be free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”
Instead, our 2011 Thanksgiving is a feast to give thanks for the plenty we have, as in “I’ve got mine. To heck with you.”
Michelle Bachmann and the Tea Partyers may disavow evolution but they sure do embrace Social Darwinism: the notion that those who have plenty are deserving; those who do not have deserve what they don’t have.
They dismiss the Occupy Wall Street protestors’ charge that America is no longer the land of opportunity, where you can go as far as your abilities and hard work will take you, a meritocracy where those who have amassed wealth and power are there because of what they have accomplished, not who they know. Rather, America has become a place where those who have material wealth also have political power and the ability to tip the playing field to their advantage.
Thanksgiving has changed because the social, economic and political climate has changed.
At the turn of the century, we needed a Thanksgiving where immigrants were mixed into America’s melting pot because we needed their labor to build Industrial America, its cities, factories, roads and railroads.
We certainly aren’t building anything, today, so we don’t need the manual labor that generations of new immigrants provided. Now we have a new group of Know Nothings (they are the No Nothings, today) who want to build electrified fences and dig alligator filled moats to keep immigrants out, and prevent anyone who cannot provide documentation from obtaining hospital services.
What does Newt Gingrich say about Occupy Wall Street protestors: Occupy Wall Street “starts with the premise we all owe them everything, ….Go get a job, right after you take a bath.”
Instead, 15 percent of youth are unemployed; 12 percent of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are out of work. People are losing their jobs in their 50s when their employers fail or toss them aside for younger, cheaper workers and are unable to find new jobs, while others are having to give up the idea of retiring at 65 and must work until age 80 to make up for what Wall Street took out of their pensions, IRAs and 401Ks.
As if 15 million Americans choose to be unemployed; as if unemployment benefits are sufficient substitute for a wage. As if 10 million more Americans don’t have to make do with part-time work. As if people aren’t having to work two and three jobs because one job alone doesn’t pay a living wage, when Newt collects $1.8 million in “consulting fees” as a “historian” to Fannie Mae. Isn’t that a lot for a historian, he was asked. “Well, I was Speaker.”
Yes, we know what Gingrich did that was worth $1.8 million: access to policy and lawmakers.
That is what Occupy Wall Street is rebelling against: that the ideal of America celebrated by Thanksgiving as a land of opportunity and freedom is no more than mythology.
This has become a society closer to Charles Dickens and the era of the French Revolution (as represented this week in Great Neck North High’s production of “Les Mis”) than those pioneering spirits who turned wilderness and swamp and prairie into farms, factories and cities.
To punctuate the point, Newt Gingrich said he would abolish child labor laws. Children in the poorest neighborhoods are “trapped in child laws” that prevent them from earning money, he said.
“Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school,” Gingrich said according to a CNN video.
The disparities are stunning and a shameful indictment: where the 1 percent control 90 percent of the assets, where the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise by 275 percent in 20 years (on a gigantic amount to begin with), when middle Americans have seen their incomes rise only scantily (on a much, much, much smaller amount to begin with).
The Haves and the Have Mores say that they pay 38 percent of taxes collected. But that’s a bargain since the top 1 percent earn 40 percent of the income.
“Essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans,” Paul Krugman wrote in the New York times, Nov. 3. “That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.
“If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low…almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent – the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.”
It is not just income disparity. The policies that have been put into place – essentially achieving the vision of America that Michelle Bachmann presents – have seriously blocked all the paths to upward mobility, from investment in child care and early childhood education, to unaffordable college tuitions and health care.
“We are slowly – and painfully – being forced to realize that we are no longer the America of our imaginations,” Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times (Oct. 28). “We sold ourselves a pipe dream that everyone could get rich and no one would get hurt – a pipe dream that exploded like a pipe bomb when the already-rich grabbed for all the gold; when they used their fortunes to influence government and gain favors and protection; when everyone else was left to scrounge around their ankles in hopes that a few coins would fall.
“We have not taken care of the least among us. We have allowed a revolting level of income inequality to develop. We have watched as millions of our fellow countrymen have fallen into poverty. And we have done a poor job of educating our children and now threaten to leave them a country that is a shell of its former self. We should be ashamed.”
According to a report “Social Justice in the OECD-how Do the Member States Compare?” the United States is a the bottom of the heap, along with Chile, Mexico and Turkey when it comes to overall social justice rating, overall poverty prevention rating; overall poverty rate; child poverty rate; Income Inequality; is in the bottom 10 when it comes to senior citizen poverty rate (helped by Social Security and Medicare); pre-primary education; and health rating.
As much as Gingrich and Bachmann like to portray the Tea Party protestors as “true patriots,” it is the Occupy Wall Street people – the 99 percent – who more accurately represent the ideals of our founders.
The society they created at Zuccotti Park was closer to the society the Pilgrims had at Plymouth than the vision of America that Bachmann, Gingrich and Romney would build. Like Plimoth, Zuccotti Park was a communal society built from scratch, where work was currency.
And what the Occupy Wall Street protestors, from New York to D.C. to Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, Portland, Seattle, and Oakland are rebelling for is a seat at the table.
But now it is on to Christmas, when the top 1 percent can buy their annual redemption with Toys for Tots, throw a bone to homeless families, toss in a coat to the collection box at Penn Station, and write out a check to the New York Times “Neediest” campaign, but do nothing meaningful to build a path from poverty to prosperity.
