Thanksgiving, Pt 2.

It's 2020, and this year will be a different Thanksgiving than I would like. This year it will be only my wife and kids at the table. I've been sad about that, so I've been thinking about Thanksgiving. That's not uncommon, I think about Thanksgiving a lot. It's the holiday that vexes me the most. I wrote about the myth versus the truth about the first thanksgiving a few years ago... you can read that here. There's also some documentaries on the "first" thanksgiving I liked, though they don’t have many views and I may be one of the few people who've watched them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQpmTQydAso

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItrKU0KaoPo

Despite the "untruths” we share about the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, it really does have a warm message at it's heart, and I want to explore that. American Thanksgiving is not simply a harvest festival. To me, at its core are two different peoples coming together and being thankful for something they have in common. So, to be an American Thanksgiving, it must bring together differing peoples, and I think we may have lost some of that.

America hasn't celebrated Thanksgiving every year. Obviously America wasn't a country in 1623 when the legendary meal was had in Plymouth. So the first official "United States of America" Thanksgiving was the one declared by George Washington as a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin” for the new federal Constitution in 1789. Thomas Jefferson did not celebrate this day, nor did he declare days of thanksgiving during his administrations. He did not believe the religious nature of the proclamation should be issued by a head of state. There were only a few Thanksgivings here and there for a long while.  

So how did Thanksgiving become a holiday?

Mary had a little lamb Little lamb, little lamb Mary had a little lamb It's fleece was white as snow

This poem was written by Sarah Josepha Hale, and she led a one woman campaign for a national day of Thanksgiving.  For decades she published editorials in newspapers and magazines, and she wrote letters of suggestion to five different Presidents. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln was looking for ways to bring together a nation struggling with a divisive civil war. Sarah's letter caught his attention, and Lincoln enshrined Thanksgiving Day as the third national holiday - the other two being Independence Day and George Washington's Birthday.

As always, Lincoln's speech on the matter is beautiful, and worth a read.... http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm

Once again, Thanksgiving was purposed to bring people together in shared solemnity, charity, and gratefulness. In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week to get an extra week of Christmas shopping as a way to stimulate the economy against the Great Depression. But Americans were unified in deriding "Franksgiving", and Roosevelt was force to return Thanksgiving to the last week in November in 1941.  There is something about Thanksgiving that resists these influences.

Bringing together people with differences is in the genetics of American Thanksgiving. I'd like to honor that, and next year (not 2020) my family are going to try to find some guests to join us for Thanksgiving. I'm sure it will be challenging to find people who don't already have plans with their own family, but I want to try to start a new tradition to to honor that important aspect of American Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day!

Thanksgiving

The first "thanksgiving" happened in October of 1621, but the constructed history and significance of that event has been over 500 years in the making.  When I was a child I liked Thanksgiving because it meant family time.  When I became a man I felt angered and betrayed by the truth of the holiday.  Now, as a father, I see Thanksgiving as a teachable moment - a chance to properly frame the history of the day while still enjoying time with my two boys, my wife, and my family.  Holidays are a wonderful chance to remember where we come from, what is important to us, and how we got where we are.  Mark Twain is attributed as saying something to the effect of "history doesn't actually repeat itself, but it often rhymes."  Thanksgiving gives us a lot of opportunity to reflect on this.

In order to better understand the first Thanksgiving, we start nearly 100 years earlier in the 1530s.  The King of England, Henry VIII, wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (she was the first of what would end up being six wives), but the Pope wouldn't allow it.  So the King declared that the Pope was no longer the head of the church.  This set England on a path that renounced Catholicism in favor of the Church of England as the ultimate religious authority, and set the King as the head of that Church.  100 years later, it was not acceptable in England to be any sort of Christian other than as part of the Church of England.

The King of England was a powerful man who may have usurped a religion to get what he wanted.  The religious intolerance of England back then echoes to recent times as strife between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.  And while today England is full of people who are allowed to practice other religions, it is interesting that in 1620 the pilgrims to America were the "wrong kind" of Christian to be in England.  (Perhaps there will always be "wrong kinds" and "others" in our society, and perhaps the test of our virtue isn't in the certainty of our beliefs, but in our tolerance for alternatives.)

Intolerance was a problem for the group of Christians who would become the Pilgrims, and that intolerance ran both ways.  They wanted to be separate from the Church of England, and to worship in their own way.  But such dissent would not be tolerated and they were persecuted.  So they fled England and moved to Holland where there was some acceptance for differences in religion.  However, these separatists didn't like their children learning dutch and adopting dutch culture.  They found it hard to integrate with Dutch society while retaining strict adherence to their own specific religious and cultural doctrine.  So the decided they needed to move again.

The Separatists were immigrants in Holland, but without the willingness to integrate they could not make Holland their home.  They themselves were intolerant of their new host country.  England wouldn't tolerate them.  They wouldn't accept Holland.  And they refused to change themselves.  Their self-imposed isolation led them to the idea that they could be left alone in America, and land with no King, to do as they pleased... and they intended to establish a new society based on their specific and strict religious and cultural beliefs.

So they worked out a deal with England (and I am simplifying this a bit).  England would give them passage to America, where they would prosper and work off the debt for this passage by sending surplus back to England, to the profit of the investors.  Because of this, the Pilgrims weren't the only people on the Mayflower.  With them were indentured servants they forced to come along, and some "company men" who were responsible for seeing to the financial success of the colony.  In their journals, the pilgrims referred to these people, with whom they would have to live and work, as "the strangers".

So the forces that brought the pilgrims to America were both religious and financial.  Here was a group of people divided between those seeking to create and spread their idea of a religious haven, and those who wanted to make money.

Fortunately the obvious conflict came to a head early, and before they stepped off the boat to start their new colony they wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact, which established a secular government for the colony.  The leadership for the colony would not rest in religion, but would be shared by all.  Well... not all... 41 men signed, out of the 101 total passengers on the ship.  Women, indentured servants, and children were not given authority to participate in the compact and did not sign it.

But this story isn't just about Pilgrims, it's also about the New World: America, and the people who already inhabited it.  While it's likely Norse sailors (specifically Leif Ericson around 1003) were the first Europeans to North America, Christopher Columbus is the most well known.  Ponce de Leon was the first to reach what would become the United States.  These explorers and those that followed brought with them horrible epidemics of disease, for which the native population had no defenses.  Not only were their immune systems unprepared for the new diseases, they had no experience or medicine for treating these new illnesses.  There is no conclusive estimate of the population of Native Americans living in what would become the United States before European explorers arrived, but credible attempts have estimated a population as low as 2 million, and as high as 18 million.  Similarly, we can't know how many died to disease, but we do know that whole villages disappeared after the arrival of the Europeans.  And we know that by 1900 there were only about 250,000 Native Americans left.  Which means that 400 years after Europeans arrived, the population of Native Americans was reduced by somewhere between 90 and 99%, with some tribes disappearing entirely.

When the first settlers started to arrive, they weren't coming to an empty continent.  They were coming to a place where people had been living for thousands of years.  They had trails, and traded with one another.  They had separate and distinct cultures and languages.  They had specialized skill sets and industries.  But now they were all being devastated by unrelenting waves of epidemic disease and war brought by visitor after visitor looking to exploit the resources of the new world.  Those that survived smallpox were still vulnerable to measles, and plague, and new variants of influenza.  Imagine wave after wave of disease killing half or more of the population over and again.  Those who didn't die still got sick.  Who gathered the food?  Who tended to the ill?  It was devastating to the people, and their cultures.  Their infrastructure crumbled, their population reduced, and their way of life was decimated.  The effect of such devastation to the psyche of a people is beyond imagining.

And so it was when the Mayflower arrived 130 years after the first explorers.  On their first two expeditions ashore the pilgrims found graves, from which they stole household goods and corn - which they would plant in the spring.  On their third expedition they encountered natives, and ended up shooting back and forth at each other (bows versus muskets).  The Pilgrims decided they didn't want to settle in this area, as they had likely offended the locals with their grave robbing and shootout, so they sailed a few days away.  They found cleared land in an easily defended area and began their settlement.  This fantastic location was no happy accident.  Just three years previous this place was called Patuxet, now abandoned after a plague killed all of its residents.  The Pilgrims will say they they founded Plymouth, but it might be more accurate to say they resettled Patuxet.

By the time the Pilgrims found Patuxet it was late December, and they huddled in their ship barely surviving the brutal, hungry first winter.  By march only 47 souls survived, though 102 had left port 6 months before.

There were, roughly, three different groups of local Natives.  They had been watching the pilgrims carefully all winter, just as the pilgrims had been watching them.  In the days before there had been frightening encounters between pilgrims and natives, and the pilgrims were rushing to install a cannon in their emerging fortification.  They were on high alert, and expecting confrontation.  Given the history, mutual fear, and mistrust, a violent encounter between the two groups seemed imminent and unavoidable.

The story many of us were told is that Squanto and a group of Indians approached the pilgrims, as if neither had ever seen the other before, and in greeting Squanto raised his hand and said, "How".  The actual truth is that a visiting chief named Samoset strode, alone,  into the middle of the budding and militarizing pilgrim town and said, "Welcome Englishman."  And then he asked for a beer.  (Truth.)  It turns out Samoset was visiting local Wampanoag chieftain Massasoit, and he spoke some broken English, which he had learned from the English fishermen near his home.  He took it upon himself to open negotiations with the new settlers.  He told them about the local tribes, and brokered an introduction to Chief Massasoit, with whom the pilgrims ultimately signed a treaty.

Along with the treaty came Squanto, a Native American originally from the now defunct Patuxet tribe.  Squanto was invaluable to the Pilgrims.  Not only could he act as a translator, but he also knew the local tribes and the area itself.  It was where he grew up.  He knew what food was available, what crops to plant and how, and he knew not only the language but the disposition and history of local tribes.  Speaking with the locals isn't enough if you can't discern their desires and motives.  Squanto was a great friend to the English Pilgrims, and acted in their interests, sometimes to his own peril.  

How did Squanto learn English language and culture? Squanto had been kidnapped by the English captain Thomas Hunt in 1614.  Hunt abducted 27 natives, Squanto among them, which he sold as slaves in Spain for a small sum.   These hostilities, just years before the arrival of the Pilgrims, are the reason for the initial animosity and aggression toward the English Pilgrims when they arrived, and why the natives were wise enough to attack the English, even if their bows were not a match for English muskets.   Exactly how Squanto survived in the old world, or how he got from Spain to England, is unclear.  It is known that a few years after his abduction, Squanto was "working" (likely as an indentured servant) for Thomas Dermer of the London Company.  Dermer brought Squanto back to the location of the Patuxet village in 1619 as part of a trade and scouting venture, but the village had been wiped out by disease.  After acting as translator and negotiator for Dermer on that trip, the now homeless Squanto stayed in America and went to live with Pokanoket tribe.  The terms of this arrangement are not clear.  It is possible Squanto was a prisoner of the Pokanoket, and that he was "given" in a trade that allowed the Dermer to exit a dangerous situation.  Regardless, Squanto chose to live out the rest of his life with the Pilgrims in his childhood home of Patuxet, now renamed Plymouth by the (re-)colonizing English Pilgrims.  Whatever the exact details, Squanto was one of the most traveled men in the area - having been born in America and spending time in Spain, England, and Newfoundland.

Squanto's time with the pilgrims appears full of adventures.  He was sent as an emissary for peace and trade on behalf of the pilgrims to numerous tribes.  It also appears he leveraged his influence among the Europeans to make some of his own demands from these tribes, which drew the ire of many local tribal leaders.  Chief Massasoit even called for Squanto's execution.  When William Bradford (Plymoth's Governor) diplomatically refused, Massasoit sent a delegation to retrieve Squanto from the Pilgrims.  Again Bradford refused, even when offered a cache of beaver pelts in exchange for Squanto, with Bradford saying, "It was not the manner of the English to sell men's lives at a price”.  Squanto was very valuable to the Plymoth colony, but he died in 1622 of "Indian fever".

In October (most likely) of 1621 the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest.  The was indeed a harvest feast attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims.  Both groups brought food and games to the three day celebration.  But this was not the start of the Thanksgiving holiday in America.  It was a harvest festival, and harvest was common ground that both cultures celebrated.   The American holiday of Thanksgiving was first celebrated as such when George Washington and John Adams declared days of thanksgiving during their presidencies.  This was followed by a long period where subsequent Presidents did not declare such events.  A writer and editor named Sarah Hale, most famous for penning "Mary Had a Little Lamb", began to champion the idea of a national "Thanksgiving" holiday in a 17 year campaign of newspaper editorials and personal letters written to five different Presidents.  Perhaps because of her insistence and the popularity she garnered for the idea, Abraham Lincoln revived Thanksgiving as a unified national holiday in 1863.  A few years later Congress enshrined it as a national celebration on the 4th Thursday of November.

And this is my Thanksgiving.  It's not the simpleton's story of an awkward greeting followed by a good meal.  It's the story of a King who wanted a divorce, religious self-righteousness, the greed of men, a clash of cultures, a struggle for survival, loyalty and betrayal,  the creation of a national holiday intended to help mend a nation torn apart by civil war, and the myths we created to tie us all together.  As always, truth is a much more engaging and explanatory than a politely shared fiction.

Failure of Leadership

My wife and I have 2 boys, ages 9 and 12.  In just over one month their school year will start again, and the news is filled with politicians and concerned stake holders trying to rally support for having students return to classrooms, or warning of the dangers that in-person schools would present in the face of covid19.  Our own local school sent parents a survey, asking what we thought... which would we prefer?  They are “kindly” offering us both options so we can pick what best fits our family’s specific needs.

What to do?  The problem is this:  I am not an epidemiologist or healthcare professional.  I do not pretend to know or have access to the latest data.  Nor am I pretentious enough to declare myself expert after a simple google search for advertisement permeated articles “carefully curated” in order of best search engine optimization techniques.  I am not an educator.  I am not an expert in the pedagogical trade offs regarding the efficacy of traditional classroom instruction as compared to online education for 9 and 12 year olds.  Nor do I think I would become one after a few hours on the Internet... not that we all have a few free hours anyhow.

And I am furious.

Why am *I* being asked this question? Our state has a health department.  We have an education department. We have a school board with full time members whose very job is to be the experts advocating for the education of our children, and keep them safe while so doing.  I am not stupid:  I am smart enough to know what I do not know. I hire experienced and knowledgeable people to do what I cannot efficiently do - fix a computer, repair an air conditioning system, fix a car, do taxes, provide healthcare, teach.  And I pay taxes for a government to perform functions like these as well - police, fire department, waste disposal, electricity, schools, disease control, etc.  

But our school is led by cowards. They know that if they say “send them all to the classroom” and something terrible happens, they will be eviscerated.  And they know that if they say “keep them home” and nothing happens (which would of course be the very exact reason to keep them home) they will be eviscerated for squandering an educational opportunity (or worse, not providing community daycare). So the cowards punt.  They say, “we will let each family decide what is best for them”... because making us responsible excuses them from any accountability for actually doing their job.  *US*, with guidance from Facebook, with third hand stories from friends and family, with contradicting news reports from television stations whose only real motivation is to sell us advertisements... *WE* are to decide what is best using our skill at accessing the best misinformation we can find.

But I get it. The parents are asked to make this decision because the schools dare not.  The schools are asked to make the decision because the district dare not.  The district needs to make the decision because the state dare not.  The state must make the decision because the federal government dare not.  

So my wife and I will make a choice.  We will do the job that our school, our district, our state, our nation should be doing.  *We*, all of us in this nation, will live with the consequences of our collective half measures.

Ultimately, we are in this rudderless, leaderless boat together.  We are each handed an oar, and asked to row, or not, in this direction, or that, whatever you feel is best.  Apparently this is how America handles a tough situation.  Cover your ass.  Do nothing.  Pass the buck.  Meanwhile, I see public health professionals on the news saying this or that and I can’t help but wonder, will their kids be in a face to face public school classroom this fall?

Was it always like this?  Or was there a time when America was capable of leadership?

Trump Ad

Among the FB ad spam, I came across a Trump ad, which I found surprising since I’m among the least likely people to vote for him.  I couldn’t help but look at this ad thinking “What would his campaign be willing to pay for to say to me?”  I was shocked at how divisive and fearful the ad was.  The word “hate” is spammed in the messaging, which is seems designed to instill anger and fear....

FB has this button that tells you “Why was I shown this ad”.  So I pushed it, and I found this...

So... FB showed me this ad because they think I’m interested in concealed carry, and can vote.  This re-contextualizes the ad for me... and now I notice that the ad prominately says “DEFEND OUR RALLIES.”

“Defend our Rallies”... “They hate you”... “They’ve been trying to take YOU down”... these are the messages the Trump campaign wants sent to people who are interested in concealed carry.

There are no words.