Even as I'm sure this meager diary will get swept off the pages of dKos like so much of Aunt Martha's freakish mystery casserole will get swept off the Thanksgiving table, I felt it my duty as a newbie Kossack to offer up my thoughts and reflections on being thankful. Enjoy. And keep your fork, there's pie below the jump...
As frequent readers know, in times of great sadness, anger and/or joy, I usually consult my favorite Neo-pagan tantric buddhist taoist rosicrucian orgasmican alchemist mystic for words of wisdom. As usual, he did not fail me today.
It is, finally and forever, just about the end of Bush -- I mean thank God and praise Jesus and fall on your knees right now, the end to a truly epic, historic rapaciousness and cronyism that we barely survived and, despite the still-stunning presence of Obama, still aren't quite sure we actually have.
So then. How do you make your lists? How do you add it all up? How many times, given all the turmoil and transformation, have you heard the phrase "It will never be the same again" or maybe "It's the end of an era" used in so many ways and applied to so many cultural and political categories, it's now officially tattooed onto the cover of the 2008 yearbook?
More importantly, what do you do with this information? How do you process and hold and move forward? And how, pray tell, to you see it as any sort of positive?
And even as the ink and pixels on the words were barely dry as they swirled around the blogosphere, he referenced with surprising prescience the impending, inevitable, obvious, ironic danger that unfolded in Mumbai, India within the same twenty four hour news cylce.
Here is the obvious, but oft-forgotten truth: It's just stupidly easy to be thankful in the flush times, or to offer thanks for those things you know you're supposed to be thankful for: health and loved ones and a big bowl of spaghetti on the table, the fact you still look OK in pants, that you somehow have the means and the technology to be able to read these words right now, thanks that you aren't living in a slum in India or are one of millions starving in Zimbabwe, that you aren't struggling for survival in the rubble of the Gaza strip or tending to hardscrabble fields of poppies in Afghanistan under the watchful rifles of the resurgent Taliban.
That kind of thanks is easy. It is, of course, far more challenging to be grateful for the clenching and the downturn and the meltdown, to offer thanks for the wicked tricksters, for fate's dark side. That kind of change, they say, can be a real bitch.
Maybe this Thanksgiving, it's all we can do to be grateful for, well, for change itself. Any kind of change. Because change is still required. Change is still the universal law. Without it, everything stops. Without it, we die. Change is the only thing we really know for sure. It's the only thing that actually makes any sense, even when it doesn't.
I could stop there, and roll the credits on my portrait that Norman Rockwell forgot to paint.
But then a little more sadness. Bitterness. Confusion. Images of today's attacks in India flickered across my eyes from half way around the world.
I read, and then re-read this orignally published here :
We might be living in the last gilded bubble of a great civilisation about to collapse into a new Dark Age, which, given our hugely amplified and widespread destructive powers, could be very dark indeed.
if we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable - gauche, uncivilised - to act in disregard of our descendants.
We need now to start thinking of our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren, as other fellow-humans who are going to live in a real world which we are incessantly, though only semi-consciously, building. But can we accept that our actions and decisions have distant consequences, and yet still dare do anything? It was an act of complete faith to believe, in the days of slavery, that a way of life which had been materially very successful could be abandoned and replaced by another, as yet unimagined, but somehow it happened. We need to make a similar act of imagination now.
May some of these words resonate with you as you come together with friends and family. May you take solace and inspiration as you slip peacefully into your tryptophan moment.