Thanksgiving

The fastest growing hobby in this country is Being Offended. I know people who spend two or three hours a day looking for things to be pissed off about, now. And with the rise of the Internet, the offended now have access to what we call Community, other like-minded and similarly offended folks who reinforce the idea that Something Must Be Done, as opposed to cautioning one another to Just Get Over It.

The result of the joining of the offended with one another is the backlash. How dare you [enjoy/participate/celebrate] this, that or the other thing, knowing how many [indigenous peoples/innocent animals/children/others] were [exploited/killed/cheated/inconvenienced] in the name of this holiday.

I'm done with that.

Christopher Columbus was on his way to India when he bumped into us. That's why my father's family are called Indians today, when they have lived their entire lives in South Dakota and Nebraska. Sure, Columbus brought the pox and VD and all manner of other ills, and took whatever he wanted to take back. But realistically, I don't see how anyone can make it right, now and why spend all of those calories being worked-up about something nobody can change anyway?

Flash ahead a hundred and twenty-eight years, and the Pilgrims also came aground here. This story has been washed clean of just about all of its truth in the nearly four hundred years since, but I have to admit I like the myth better. The idea that the first Thanksgiving was a feast, that it was the Pilgrims who invited the Indians to join them, that everyone was all clean and shiny in their buckled shoes. Maybe after four hundred years you get a pass. I don't know.

I just don't have much patience with people who sit in the back of the room at the party and say things like, "You know, the millennium doesn't really start tonight..." or "You know, the Pilgrims would have starved if the Indians hadn't shared that day..." or "You know, this used to be a Pagan holiday..."

I come from a place a little different from most people, I'm sure. Peter Mayer said it all for me in his song, Holy Now. I'm not happy giving thanks on only a single day every year, and maybe particularly not this day, but I understand an awful lot of people are too busy to even notice, and so for them having a holiday is probably a good idea. Let's all step back, count our blessings and take a deep breath. And besides, there's turkey and dressing and football and tires at 40% off and we have to rest up for Black Friday shopping.

I am thankful. I have great friends, and great family (except for one guy). I have a great home and a great job and I get to share all of this with my favorite wife. Yeah, I fell and broke my foot on Hallowe'en, but it could have been so much worse.

I have a lot of nice things, and I have a lot of good-enough things. I don't drive a Mercedes, but I have a Honda that has never let me down. I don't have the latest iMac, or iPod or iPhone, but the iMac, iPod and iPhone I do have has been mine for years and still does everything I need to do, online and in the home. I have a lot of nice things, nice guitars, favorite books and big TVs. I have my dad's tools. Our house isn't a palace, but we're not palatial people. We're two-bedroom, brick, people, with attached garages and fireplaces. It's not great but it's good enough, for us. I'm thankful.

I sometimes feel like I swim upstream against technology. About the time I get comfortable with something, history shows it goes away. I was a master of RedRyder and White Knight, telecomm software for the Macintosh, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I knew my way around the XMODEM, YMODEM and ZMODEM file transfer protocols, and the whole "AT" command set for Hayes modems. All of that came and went in the span of about a dozen years.

But I'm thankful I work in a field where every day is subtly different. I'm not working on the same things in the same way I did a decade ago. I'm always mindful that three months from now, six months from now, things are going to be different. And even though this is often scary to me, I'm thankful just the same.