Best Day

This is the Best Day! Thanksgiving in adulthood has quietly become my favorite holiday. Christmas is a better party and it might be more irreplaceable. Easter is sublime but more a feast (religious, that is) than a holiday.

Thanksgiving comes though after the exertions of early Fall. It's a welcome rest in the way that those other two holidays never are. (You can see we do it quietly at our house; no dramatic, huge spreads. I'm not that much of a cook that I invite the whole neighborhood over!)

It's secular religion-lite too. You couldn't have it without the impulse of Christianity and the peculiar weather and early history of the United States, and it suits us. Autumn is a Northern hemisphere glory and perhaps more in the maple forests of the new world than in the old.

It makes sense to celebrate before the hard winter sets in, and there's precious little animism abroad in the U.S.. We don't set bon-fires to appease dark spirits that we don't entirely believe in but we do pause before the onset of that winter, bigger than we are, that reminds us of our status on earth as invited guests.

I hope we continue to remember. We have often been greedy or unruly guests, ruining what we touch. That's not okay. I hope we remember, and I sense, each Thanksgiving, that most of us do and for that I am grateful.

So on this day, fractious as I often am at other times, I feel comfortable and at home, where I am, a member of the group.

Blighted Years

In the aftermath of the Obama victory, I'm thinking things I haven't thought for a while.

I'm reminded of a science fiction story -- a world in the future, its planet so degraded by abuse and time that all living creatures, at all times, were in unbearable pain which they survived by a rigorous social consensus that all was well.

I read this long ago, flush with youth myself. I don't think I was even a teen-ager yet; certainly not an adult. It even, such was my innocence, took a few minutes, maybe an hour, before the thought crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't so much science fiction as social commentary.

I was too young to entertain the thought for long, and there was no one on the event horizon who would understand me at all if I asked about it or commented.

But it stayed with me, along with a later fantasy world overloaded, by a malignant nature, with addictive substances. That couldn't be us, could it? Sugar, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, corn chips (CORN CHIPS!!!).

When later I became a Christian again, after a few months pondering the attractions of The World-Flesh-Devil, I had a moment of shock when I began to sense what underlay the concept, the rot in politics, television, novels, architecture, restaurant dining, couture. Don't get me wrong, I love and approve all these things, but they can't, these days, pretend to the same awe they inspired in my youth.

You can scare yourself with these thoughts but you can't live a life which escapes them. The honest man lifts the curtain of maya, and really wants to know what's back there, good or bad.

In the aftermath of this election, and the stunning sense of freedom that has been leaking at the margins of my cynicism since then, I think I see my whole life span till now as suffering under a blight of political lies.

What was exciting about Barack Obama politically was that he could laugh at the lies told about himself. Who does that?

The fact that this strategy succeeded still dazzles me. I have been told for so long that this doesn't work, that national politics is a "no mistakes" arena where candor is disallowed.

The fact, though, is that Obama took the truth to the literate through the medium of the internet, and suddenly America seems to be full of people who actually can think and evaluate the news.

Who knew?

And if this is true, what else is possible?????