Thanksgiving put me in a reflective mood, so I hope you’ll indulge me.
What a wonderful holiday! Today, it is celebrated because of its universality and capacity to unite families. People will travel hundreds of miles to be with family members they haven’t seen in months and share a single meal with loved ones.
But it is important not to forget Thanksgiving’s more visceral origins. Thanksgiving began as a harvest holiday meant to celebrate the fact that there would be food to eat in the coming winter. That’s why it’s celebrated a month earlier in Canada.
For nearly all of human history, having a failed harvest was a real possibility, and death from starvation was not out of the question. In some places in the world, it still is. But for most Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries, thankfully, it is not.
Yet, in what has been labeled the Great Recession, it is important to acknowledge this more visceral Thanksgiving narrative. Today, many Americans are, in fact, struggling to get by. Though most are not starving, the pangs of necessity are no longer so distant. Obesity may be one of America’s greatest health problems, but, ironically, so is hunger.
Saturday’s New York Times brought news that one out of every eight Americans and 25 percent of children are now receiving food stamps. The numbers are astonishing, and even more so considering that not all those eligible for food stamps use them. Many of those recently added to the dole are among the working poor or people left unemployed by layoffs and a stagnant economy. People who never thought they would have to rely on public assistance now have few other choices.
Yet, while reading the article, I could only think of how the increase in the number of Americans receiving food stamps was merely a symptom of a year filled with bad news in the United States. The housing market collapsed, unemployment soared, tent cities sprung up under bridges and Bear Stearns—previously one of Wall Street’s mainstays—evaporated in a cloud of debt.
These are things that everyone is familiar with, and that I imagine many people at Duke have been touched by in varying degrees of severity. And, when I read the New York Times piece, they were the stories and images that I immediately reflected upon.
The article—instead of evoking the sullen and despondent faces of hungry Americans—made me think of the oscillating curves of boom-and-bust cycles, waves of monetary flows and a national debt looming overhead threatening to crush all of our futures. It’s so easy to intellectualize these problems to avoid being overcome by the fact that so many of them involve real people suffering, and now, even people close by.
It took me awhile to think of the problem in very simple, human terms. I tried to envision empty pantries, skipped meals and hungry children crying. When I did, I realized why I was thankful for Thanksgiving.
I am thankful for Thanksgiving because it reminds me that boom-and-bust cycles are not simply about the rising and falling of bank accounts or the interest rates on T-bonds. Boom-and-bust cycles are about the difference between plenty and famine. Thanksgiving provides physical metaphors for things that are difficult to understand intellectually. Thanksgiving let’s me know what gratitude feels like.
This column this semester has been an attempt to explore some serious problems facing our society—discrimination, terrorism, etc. I hope that my discussion of them has been more than an abstract intellectual exercise.
I hope that, like Thanksgiving, my columns have occasionally made you pause and think.
We are all connected, just like in “Lion King.” Seriously.
Good, now that you’re actually with me. This country and this world have a lot of problems and it will be up to us to solve them.
But we still have reason to give thanks.
Yousef AbuGharbieh is a Trinity senior. This is his final column of the semester.
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