This last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, the older, original, though lesser known North American fall communal celebration of gratitude and family.
I am at present rereading Jane Jacob's "Dark Age Ahead", we are up to our armpits in debt, we are about to elect one of the most regressive governments in our history, and yet I am optimistic.
Call me crazy. Go ahead.
One of Jacob's main points about the causes for our coming dark age is the failure of the family and the loss of linkage between households (economic creatures) and the nuclear family. REpubLICans quite often smudge the distinction between households and families...
Households are how we choose (or sometimes not choose) to live and meet our material needs for shelter, food, and material needs; families are who those with which we choose to love and associate and procreate. Its how we nurture our spirit and values and culture
Families have not always been congruent with households. The part of the "American Dream" where an ideal single nuclear family with a single wage earner could live in a single house was a fleeting and brief and recent occasion in American cultural history.
Other examples of households have ranged from the informal to the coercive or revolutionary and militaristic. Monasteries, prisons, military bases, gangs, fraternities, boarding houses, upper class manors, communes, crackhouses, co-ops, resthomes, clubs, all provide to one extent or another for material needs.
Jacobs points out that sometime in the seventies the median income for families dipped under the median cost for household maintenance. Ever since we have seen the stress effects of trying to stretch the resources of our families to meet the needs of our households. Divorce rates are up, as are debt rates as is the gap between income and cost of living.
So why am I so hopeful?
I just spent a Sunday with extended family. My sisters, their husbands, my parents, my partner, our daughters and, all told, twenty one souls related by blood, love, and promises. There were my sister and her husband who, twenty years ago were left almost bankrupt when a business partner betrayed them. I was single at the time and had more money than I really needed (not really), so I called up their local grocery store (long distance) and had groceries delivered.
Five years ago, when I was near death, my sister, a nurse, stood with my wife, who spoke limited English. She tracked down the duty doctor and impressed on him that he was to call her first with any bad news. She and my other sister, a teacher like me, took care of all the paper work and insurance and disability claims.
On Sunday we kidded my sister by calling her "Granny". She is forty three years old. Her second oldest is the proud father of a three week old daughter. He and his partner are hardworking, good people and are as poor as church mice. My eight year old daughter got to hold a "real baby" for the first time. The exalted princess showed she is truly a part of our loud and boisterous tribe by not waking up even as the dinner party roared on.
The memory of the look on my daughter's face is a particular treasure.
The nuclear family is not in trouble, really. The nuclear family household may well be. But we have shown ourselves to be resilient in our social support of one another. New types of household arrangements are blooming.
Canada's history and climate have shown us a truth - we are all in this together. Support of the neediest is a value that we expect to be reflected and executed by our government. If our family households struggle and the government response is not adequate (as it has been) or is sabotaged by underfunding (as it has been) then we expand the support of family and the meaning of that term.
For example: there is a gay couple in Toronto who are of my family, though not by blood or marriage. They helped me when I washed ashore from Korea, temporarily penniless, jobless, hopeless.
Today, my country may well be making a wrong turn, based on a minority of the population who are driven by a fear and a lust for punitive action against anything other than what they understand. I'm sure you saw something like this four years ago in your own country...
But the lesson of the first Canadian Thanksgiving is that we must never give up exploring and looking for new ways to live and live together.
We are all in this together.