Giving Thanks

Content warning: discussion of racism, sexism, outdated language, capitalist assholery, mental health, neurodiversity, and holidays that ignore these things.

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I don't like Thanksgiving as we were taught about it in the 1970s.

We know more now, it's a day putatively celebrating the indigenous people being decent to the colonizers, but that completely ignores all the atrocities committed. Then and later and - systemically - to this day.

Those public-school teachings seem to be better, or at least more accurate, these days. You can see in my personal blog about the ways in which my younger child (then four, now 14) tried to explain it. My older child (nearly 19, class of 2021) says they were still on the "everyone had a party and lived happily ever after" train when she was in elementary school but in middle and high school they started telling more of the story. And that 14yo says "they tell more than they did when we were little but still not all the bad stuff."

Please excuse the regressive language in the linked blog; I've learned a fair bit about appropriate language in the last ten years.

We're discussing these old posts on my personal blog as I type, and my older daughter said, "You know, I think that my favorite thing is that Lizzy didn't understand racism at four, but she totally grokked sexism." (Yes, we do use words like "grok" in my household).

She's not wrong about this.

In any case (she says wryly, attempting to get her ADHD brain back on the originally intended track) this post is about being thankful or feeling gratitude without being a racist asshat.

I'm grateful for many things, in spite of all the awful. I'm grateful that my kids and I are basically healthy, that I have a better handle on things than I did this time last year, and for oxford commas. I'm thankful that I have a home, a job, and that my sister is doing the hard work for today's massive dinner. Massive dinner for a small group - there were eight of us when there are usually several more because Covid is still a thing and we're sticking to small vaccinated groups when we can.

We say not to sweat the small stuff, but we don't remember to be grateful for it, either. It's a problem that seems to be endemic to the hypercapitalist culture in which I live.

By the standards of that hypercapitalist culture, I'm a failure. I work part-time in a service industry. I live in a mobile home, and it's always paycheck to paycheck around here. I'm neurodivergent and I don't hide it. I'm fat. My car is twenty years old and needs new brakes and I can't afford to get a second one for my teen driver. I can't throw money at most things to fix them, because I don't have it.

These may be the causes (or at least some triggers) for some of my mental health issues; money may not buy happiness, but it does buy peace of mind. I could use some of that.

But the point here is not that I'm complaining; I'm just stating the fact that by the standards of the culture I grew up in, I have failed.

This does not reflect badly on me; it simply shows that the culture is broken. And the people who have succeeded in this hypercapitalist culture seem to be the ones who cling to the "and they all lived happily ever after" narrative tooth and nail. I mean all the school board angst about CRT or sex education (even though they can't define either) show that pretty clearly.

(No, of course, it's not all people who have succeeded by our culture's rules; I'm talking about the loudmouths here).

For those sorts of people, they seem content with "giving thanks" on the fourth Thursday of November (and presumably in church on Sundays for many of them). They don't think about the little day-to-day things they have to be thankful for.

But me? I'm thankful that I have a roof over my head, food to eat, and the kids and I are basically healthy.

It's really all that matters.