In its earliest manifestation, Thanksgiving was less of a celebration
and more a literal reflection of the very word itself.
Those who first gave thanks on this continent did so because they had literally survived the many perils of life in a strange, new and exceedingly vast world.
These days, Thanksgiving is a holiday, a time for family and friends, a drawing in of the nation's collective breadth before the commercial stampede that is the secular manifestation of Christmas.
Despite the times that are in it, we have arrived at this year's Thanksgiving once again in the knowledge that we have much to be thankful for.
Yes, the economy is in poor shape and there is a restlessness in the land, but the laws and institutions that bind our society still hold sway.
That said, there are many people across the nation this Thanksgiving who are giving thanks for a lot less than they might have hoped for. We speak here of the millions of unemployed and under employed, and those who are facing into the Christmas season with the prospect of joblessness looming all the larger given the exaggerated material demands of that season.
Behind them there are those who are looking to 2012 as the year when they are to arrive, either out of high school or college, on a jobs market that has offered little to be thankful for these past several years.
So behind the rituals of this Thanksgiving there is a broader picture, one in which our continental home yet again seems to harbor perils that we once might have thought were confined to the past.
There has long been a habit to imagine the United States as being somehow behind a great wall, removed from the rest of the world and its many imperfections. This was never truly the case, at least not to the fullest extent of popular imagination.
America is intricately linked to other continents and nations, our fortunes bound together with the lives of billions of people that we will never actually meet. As such, our nation daily needs to go about its domestic and international business with a sureness of foot, and a lightness of it too.
It needs to, but doesn't always do so.
Of late, we seem to be a little less sure, and in place of lightness we appear to be treading heavily, even stuck fast in place. This is especially the case with regard to our national discourse, our politics, which lately has done little other than give cause for indifference, disgust and widespread protest, both from the right and the left.
Tea Party protests and Occupy protests seem an unlikely pairing to give thanks for. But we should. We should always be thankful that people care enough to leave their television sets and computer screens and take to the streets because of a sense that something is not quite right, indeed might be quite wrong.
That people might have opposing views of what our ills are, and what should be done about them, is of less concern than a situation in which people simply shrug their shoulders and accept whatever fate the advance of the calendar year dishes up.
So protest, within the bounds of the law, is to be welcomed.
And so is this Thanksgiving, even though it falls in a time of angst and, yes, protest.
