The Coffee Table

Hollow Thanksgrieving

November 22, 2020—The anniversary of JFK’s assassination. As a martyr, he never got to prove what he might have achieved; LBJ won on the Civil Rights movement and War on Poverty, but lost on the Viet Nam war and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

Since modern times, especially the life of the USA, people have lived in the belief that every era, every decade, is the culmination of human history. I have, since my “baby boomer” birth, through hiding under the desks to avoid atom bombs, through the phenomenal social changes which attempt to make all human persons meet the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal.”

People in modern times—particularly since the birth of the US—always live in a significant period of history. Our parents and forebears lived in the same. My dad—born 1910—was amazed that horseless carriages begat Cadillacs, that the Wright brothers presaged Man on the Moon. He loved airplanes.

From computers as big as a house to pocket “phones,” from radio to TV to internet. We are advised to practice “Zoomgiving” this week by communicating via digital video, a notion first predicted in E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella, The Machine Stops, in which technology is worshipped by humans who live in rooms isolated from everyone else. Sound familiar?

For Thanksgiving, I am grateful to survive this combination of pandemic and economic strangulation. It has been a lovely autumn where we live, not too cold, sufficient rainfall, watching the birds and deer outside. No hurricanes, no wildfires.

I’m thawing a turkey frozen last year, and will cook cranberry bread, my whirled famous holiday punch, mashed taters and gravy, etc. But our other traditions vanished—no guests, no post-Thanksgiving gumbo party and jam session—not even our grown children will visit. One is in Melbourne, Australia, one works online from home in Fayetteville, and one is quarantined in Grandma’s old house in Berryville; I can deposit Thanksgiving dinner on her front porch. I may package up gumbo and cranberry bread to leave with musician friends with whom we cannot gather on Saturday.

Everyone I know heeds the advice to renege on a large Thanksgiving dinner and a small Christmas funeral. We will probably have no Christmas celebrations, nor our New Year’s Day black-eyed peas and cornbread musical get together. I think I have picked on a guitar only a half-dozen times since March. My social life is random encounters in the grocery store or library. We’ve had some contractors here for home improvement projects, but masked from casual conversations. We forgot to Zoom in the Writers’ Colony’s Poetluck emceed by daughter in quarantine.

We’re safe and secure in our little bubble. Outside the infection rate climbs, the death rate slides up, locally and across the planet. And our president has forgotten the coronavirus and its consequences, his sole concern how to hold onto the job he has no idea how to perform.

Mitch McConnell will call the Senate back into session before the end of the year. His agenda: (A) do nothing. (B) do less than nothing. (C) work to incapacitate the incoming administration. The session will begin with a new Trump-a-virus pledge:

“I pledge a grievance, for the King, of the divided stakes in America, undo the republic, for which he slams, one nation, disunited, mocking God, with literal injustice for all.”

At some point, the loyalist sycophants in the Republican party must begrudgingly admit that the game is over for their emperor, and the long march of history will slog onward.

I am sorrowful that our holidays are reduced, but I am more sorrowful that my country has forgotten what gratitude we should observe, what we share in common as residents of the United States, opportunities and benefits that should accrue to us all.

Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a day of fasting and prayer during the Civil War. Fasting has evolved to feasting, prayer replaced by the Macy’s parade and televised football. It’s a hollow thanksgrieving, our 2020 vision blindsided by disease and destruction, brotherhood blasted where anyone different is shunned as an outcast.

I’m working to be grateful. Hope you are too.