11/26/20

By Josh Rubin

Witness: Thanksgiving

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I like to think of it as a harvest feast. Because thinking about Europeans arriving on the shores of a continent settled millennia earlier by earlier migrants—well, that flavors the food with the spice of conquest, subjugation, and genocide. Not an appealing recipe for turkey, or anything else.

So, if I am, as we are exhorted to do, to feel and give voice to gratitude, without irony, I would think about the accident of life, for those humans I love, and for the not quite as accidental plants and animals arranged to feed us. If I struggle with this feeling, and I do, I think of the gratitude the cultivators of the earth feel for a good crop. My mind goes to mountainside stands of corn and squash and such, on precarious slopes in Guatemala, for instance. And I am forced to think of other days, because these days climate and greed have spoiled these once green and terraced hillsides for many, haven’t they?

If my sometimes grim view of things makes it hard to celebrate in times like these, I have two choices, it seems to me. To think of other times, or to marvel at the astonishing capacity that people, far worse off than I, have to relish their lives and loves. So, I picture migrants who leave their desperate homes lifting their faces to the light they imagine at the end of a long road.

Thank you for that light.