Happy Thanksgiving! The place is swept, there’s a distant descendent of dinosaurs in the oven, the pets want some of whatever you’re cooking even if it isn’t good for them, and the guests are on the way. If you’re going to pile coats on the bed in the guest room, you might consider making the bed, but who are we to boss you around?
You might be with the family you grew up in, or you may be with the family you’ve constructed otherwise. However you do Thanksgiving, including not doing it at all, we love you and hope you are spending it with people who are good for you. Or you might be quietly by yourself this year, which how I’ve spent some Thanksgivings, too, watching the MST3K Turkey Day Marathon.
This is another weird Thanksgiving in the Trump Era, which in this second term has become even more frightening than the first time around. We thought it was pretty awful then, and seems certain to require far more reconstruction than after the first ruinous round. We’re coming off a government shutdown that for the first time ever in the fairly brief history of federal shutdowns (since 1980) resulted in an interruption of already-meager federal food assistance programs. The Trump administration actually asked the Supreme Court to please please not make it use available funding to feed hungry American children, which in a year of incredible cruelties is both remarkable and more of the same.
I spent part of the Saturday before Thanksgiving waiting in line at a food bank with my Ukrainian friend, whose immigration status is in limbo. (She applied to renew her humanitarian parole last December before it expired, then Trump came to power and suspended parole renewals until June. Her various applications for legal status are crawling through the system.) Her son is a trucker, but food for the family isn’t always a given. There were lots of people in line, as there have been for all our visits to food banks in the last couple months. For many people in this Trump-blighted nation of plenty, the brink feels a lot closer this winter.
But in our trips to the food bank, I’ve also seen a steady flow of cars and pickups —even the occasional trailer — bringing supplies to donate to the food bank, too. Americans, even in goddamned Idaho, are in general better than the people some of us keep electing. And as the madness keeps coming, Americans are increasingly sick of the people running things, willing to choose hope, and ready to demand better.
There are lights and warmth in the darkness.
With that in mind, let’s enjoy “Perhaps The World Ends Here,” an achingly lovely 1994 poem by Joy Harjo from her collection The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems. It isn’t specifically about the Thanksgiving holiday but speaks to some of the things that make the holiday so resistant to commercialization.
Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation who lives in Oklahoma, celebrates the kitchen table as the focus of everything we also think is important about the holiday: home, family, love, food and company, and yes, conflict and broken hopes, and the possibility — sometimes never fulfilled — of reconciliation, if it can be made to work.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table. […]
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
Here’s video of Harjo reading the poem, from Poets.Org:
By Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
“Perhaps the World Ends Here” from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.wwnorton.com.
That final line stays with us like the memory of a holiday gathering.
May your Thanksgiving table be surrounded by people you love, or can put up with at least. May you recharge your soul’s batteries, and if they don’t get fully charged, remember that for many devices, like EVs and phones, 80 percent state of charge is actually better for overall battery life. May you find joy where it can be found, and may we all work for a world where everybody’s kids will know they’ll get a good meal and have a roof over their heads.
A happy and safe Thanksgiving to all Wonkers everywhere, and remember to Buy (almost) Nothing tomorrow. We love you.
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If you’re missing our old standby, the Gus Van Sant video of William Burroughs reading his “Thanksgiving Prayer,” that too remains online, at the link. Our reasons for bringing down the curtain on that tradition are discussed here, in our final post of the Burroughs poem (short version: We’re so woke that we agreed with readers who were understandably creeped out by Burroughs having gotten away with killing Joan Vollmer, his wife, in 1951). It’s OK to let some traditions go.
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