My Turn: Thanksgiving and revolution

By PAUL A. LEVY

For the Monitor

Last modified: 12/14/2014 8:11:33 AM

It’s again time to celebrate the older of America’s two extraordinary “T-parties,” Thanksgiving.



The two parties are strikingly different. For one thing, they arose at two very different times. Pilgrims in the early 1600s were vulnerable newcomers, allowed to share land that red men had occupied for millennia, and to share it rent-free because of the strange Native American belief that God’s earth could not be owned. By the time of the Boston Harbor event 150 years later, we had come to occupy and essentially control the coastal colonies and were poised to launch our War of Independence from England that would inspire colonies in the Western Hemisphere and eventually colonies around the world to overthrow colonial oppression.



Most importantly, the two parties depict different values.



Thanksgiving exemplifies the best of our community values: for a moment, we sat together – red and white; men, women and children – respecting each other as equals, honoring one another’s humanity, caring for one another by sharing hard-earned bounty, all in peace. In contrast, the Boston party exemplifies the best of our love of liberty, our loathing of oppression, our sense of self-reliance, and perhaps our courageous and rebellious nature.



Both parties embody important sets of American aspirations that are hard to attain. All too often, for example, we have lost sight of Thanksgiving ideals. In fact, soon after that first party, we were at war with Native Americans, and after that we often set very different tables for people based on color, race, class, gender, sexual preference, religion and ethnicity. Some of our greatest challenges and triumphs have been moments where we insisted on equality and community principles across those lines.



Or again, we have often forgotten the experience of being strangers like the Pilgrims and forgotten the moral value of welcoming, and some of our best moments as a nation have been when we overcame our initial suspicion of newcomers from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Japan, Latin America and other strange, faraway places. Or again, we often have forgotten how much we depend on one another’s labor, and some of our finest moments have been when we reached out – not in pity or charity, but in the spirit of community and humility – to share our bounty just like Indians and Pilgrims.



Of course the ideals of the Boston Harbor party are also hard to fulfill, and our pursuits of them have also been among our finest hours.



What we might like to ignore is that sometimes the ideals depicted by each T-party and embedded together in our aspirations don’t go hand-in-hand. Independence, for example, can grate against interdependence.



Fighting oppression can lead victors to replace the oppressors they overthrew. Self-reliance does not always fit neatly with community. So, in a very real and vivid way, these two T-parties frame some of the key contradictions of the American character as we aspire to be both Pilgrims and Sons of Liberty.



Moreover, our exuberance for one or the other set of values often leads us to forget that we hold both sets dear, and to forget how important and difficult it is to reconcile them.



And mostly in that exuberance, we all too often approach reconciliation in the throw-it-overboard way of the second party when we all know – in our community and democracy – it should happen in the sit-at-one-table way of the first: black, yellow, brown, white and red; red and blue.



It is important, on Thanksgiving, to remember this and to remember a deeper truth that it suggests.



The humanistic values and aspirations of Thanksgiving are the heart of America at its best – a community of equals, deeply respecting each other’s essential humanity, sharing hardship and abundance humbly on God’s earth. The values of the second T-party – independence, self-reliance, freedom from oppression – are also vital, but they are vital in service to the first principles.



If independence leads to gross inequality, self-reliance to intense greed and freedom from oppression to the domination of others, we destroy the great promise of our nation. For, those great Boston Harbor core values are revolutionary and moral only to the extent that they serve our core Thanksgiving values.







(Paul A. Levy lives in Concord.)





