Many of us will gather around a table with loved ones today to celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday, we tell ourselves, to celebrate the coming together of Pilgrims and Indians to share a meal. It’s a day to give thanks for what we have.
We should be giving thanks for the generosity of others.
The original Americans extended kindness to a group of new arrivals, Separatists searching for a new home across the ocean so they could worship free of oppression. These Puritan refugees left in search of a better life. They left on an overcrowded and underprovisioned Mayflower because they could not stay where they were.
They landed far from where they’d planned to be. They traded with and learned about agriculture from the people already living here, which allowed the Pilgrims to survive.
If it weren’t for the generosity of people who chose to help needy newcomers — despite stark differences in appearance, culture, religion and language — much in the world would be different.
But here we are, centuries later, because, when it comes down to it, one group of people decided that those differences weren’t as important as what they had in common with those in need — humanity.
That spirit is slipping. Our nation’s vaunted words and ideals haven’t been always been practiced — an economy built on the slave labor of kidnapped people, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the refusal of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, Jim Crow laws — but we don’t like to talk about that.
Instead, the belief of righteousness embedded in those soaring words has the unfortunate ability to cover over facts, to dismiss those shameful acts as aberrations. We’re America, after all. The land of the free and the home of the brave.
We betray that founding as newcomers in need with the current reactionary fear of refugees from Syria and Iraq. Many governors are saying they won’t allow these refugees into their states, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey says that he will turn away all refugees.
It is certainly true that the generosity of those early Native Americans has not been repaid in kind. Quite the opposite.
Is that the Thanksgiving lesson we, as a nation, want to celebrate?
We can’t gather around the Thanksgiving table to celebrate the arrival of our nation’s forebears as refugees, and to give thanks for the welcome they received from strangers, while trying to turn away the desperate souls fleeing for their lives today.
