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"There are a lot of impossible, unspoken rules on Thanksgiving. We're supposed to be thankful and eat a lot and drink a lot and be nice to each other. Teenagers are supposed to stop being sullen. Matriarchs are supposed to make a perfect turkey and some man is supposed to know how to carve it." Joann Loulan (family therapist)I found this quote and thought it to be rather funny. And of course, like anything that I find interesting, it launched my head into all sorts of directions. Funny thing I've noticed over the past few days, I keep forgetting that it's Thanksgiving coming up. Now, this could be due to me not having any plans for the holiday, other than patrolling for security Thursday night into the wee hours of Friday morning when everybody is drunk driving home. But I think it's also due to the fact that I just don't take seriously the holiday anymore.
Ms. Loulan's comment is about unspoken rules and it could quite easily be about misconceptions people have as well; misconceptions not only about family and familial roles, but more broadly speaking, about the very holiday itself. I mean, who's kidding who here, the holiday is about a false history, a time in which invading Europeans and the indigenous tribes of the continent got together and gave thanks. Course, the thanks been given were quite different. The tribes no doubt thought that the invaders would go home. The invaders however were no doubt being grateful for the ignorance of the tribes in dealing with this situation, since that gave them license to murder, rape, pillage and otherwise destroy an entire civilization without much of a counter-attack.
What's curious here is that this situation is rather reminiscent of the one in Iraq. The European invaders often justified their abuses by claiming to bring "civilization" and the "true religion" to the noble-savages. It was a quaint subterfuge for what was truly abject racism and bigotry; an example being how people ogle and find so cute the antics of dogs falling over a new toy, the underlying thought being superiority over the lower form of life.
The same today occurs in Iraq. I have lost count the number of times I've heard it said that the middle-east civilization has its own means of understanding things, even to the point of describing female genital mutilation and child rape as merely forms of their "culture." The point here is not to say that such actions are correct, but the snobbery in which they are described easily hides from discussion the devastation that we are bringing upon the country. A recent estimate reported that over 3,700 CIVILIANS died simply in the month of October. This is no doubt a rather low estimate, given that much of the country remains a virtual no-man's land for our troops.
So on this Thanksgiving day, as the turkey and sweet potatoes are passed around and we all engorge ourselves on food that vast portions of the globe would and are, dying to get ahold of, remember about illusions and the propensity we as Americans have of ignoring what is right in front us. This not only goes to familial patterns of control, but also to global patterns of injustice.
