Thanksgiving Thoughts
For real, though: Turkey isn’t my favorite food by a long shot. Taken from Flickr.
Ah, yes. As of the time I’m writing this post, it is ten days until Thanksgiving. It is the most American of holidays, in which we look for any excuse to (over)eat and celebrate something we don’t fully understand. Maybe I’ll write about the holiday’s colonial history in a near-future post, but not today.
Most of the time, we have Thanksgiving with my paternal grandmother. This year both of my living grandparents (both my grandmothers) are going to join us for this time-honored tradition. Although we are not a particularly religious family, it’s still customary for us to go around in a circle and say what we’re thankful for before we dig into the meal.
I don’t know what I’m going to say this year. Yes, I’ve got a 3.65 GPA in undergrad. Yes, I have a loving family - my siblings are my best friends, after all. And I’m excited to begin graduate studies in urban planning. All of those are good things.
And yet, it’s hard to be happy when the world seems to be collapsing all around you. A failed former President ran for the office again after endless corruption scandals, reckless endangerment of the environment, and overseeing over a million deaths in this country alone from a completely preventable pandemic.
Because he was President, he was able to appoint three Injustices to the Supreme Court. They’re on a warpath, and when they’re finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath of rights dying in daylight. His actions led directly to two genocides in Ukraine and the Middle East. And of course, let’s not forget January 6, 2021, the Beer Gut Putsch, that he was not held accountable for, and now will never be held accountable for.
And now, of course, he’s President-elect once again. America is a depraved, sick nation that never learns from its mistakes. To be clear, this was true long before November 5, but the reelection of Donald Trump was another exhibit in “Mamma Mia! Here I go again!” I’m ashamed to call myself an American, and again, that was true even before Trump won two weeks ago.
How I feel about the American flag now. Image taken from the ACLU of California.
But this crystalizes the fact that I just don’t belong here. This country’s values are not compatible with my own values. I value reason, justice, and a reckoning with our common humanity; the United States values basically the opposite.
It doesn’t matter that I’m a white person who has never stared down the barrel of a police officer’s weapon, and will in all likelihood never need to learn how to act in such a situation. It doesn’t matter that I’m a cisgender man who will never need an abortion and won’t face genocide for my sexual orientation or gender identity. And it doesn’t matter that I’m a native-born citizen who wouldn’t be deported (though deportation from the U.S. doesn’t really sound too bad right now). I simply can’t stand to live in a country where half the population wants a convicted felon responsible for the atrocities listed above to be their leader.
Even my home state of Massachusetts isn’t immune from this insanity. In 2020, ranked-choice voting, which would do the most to save American democracy if it were implemented nationwide (which it won’t be), was on the ballot here. It went up in flames because Republicans were able to convince enough people that ranked-choice meant less choice. You read that right. They convinced 55 percent of the voting public in one of the bluest, least insane states in the country of such an insane claim for which nothing could be so blatantly far from the truth.
Even then, I suppose I have some things to be thankful for. Unlike some people in this country, I live in a family that all voted the same way in the most recent election. Some awkward conversations might be held over the turkey, mashed potatoes, corn bread, and green beans, but the political discussion will not be among them. We will be free to air our grievances about the situation together.
But if I were in the LGBTQ+ community and had a family member who voted for Trump, I don’t know that I would be able to face them the same way again. In fact, I almost definitely wouldn’t be. And I certainly don’t blame any such person who decides to cut off contact with their Trump-supporting relative. This video sums up my feelings on the matter pretty nicely.
On Election Night, my university’s Democrats club held a watch party. Of course, I use the word “party” loosely here, because it felt more like a funeral after a while. You could say the atmosphere fell from a coconut tree - the high of “brat summer”, when it looked like Kamala Harris had all the enthusiasm in the world, was long gone.
And yet, I believe it would have been far worse if I were alone. Almost any difficult situation is harder to deal with when you don’t have anyone else to share it with. Maybe this Thanksgiving, that is what I will appreciate most of all. As long as my family has each other, there will still be hope.
Kamala Harris supporters at her Washington, DC watch party on Election Night when things went south. Taken from ABC News.
