A Question For Discussion This Holiday
Let's Do More Than Gratitude At This Year's Thanksgiving Get-Together
Well here we are in what's become something like Gratitude Week in the US. Well, gratitude + gluttony in many cases. In the midst of all of that I have a question. Maybe you do, too. Back to that in a minute.
First though let's talk about the gratitude piece. Because the reason for the Thanksgiving holiday this week is complicated. Which is a spectacular understatement.
I love the idea of "giving thanks" all week... but I'm also living on land ceded in treaties and purchases after a whole lot of war, violence, and death. The Iowa people (Bah-Kho-Je, a Sioux tribe) ceded the specific land that I live on. To the victor go the spoils.
Wait, which spoils?
The LAND.
The neighborhood I live in is a thriving new development with restaurants, businesses, apartment buildings, duplexes, and single family homes tricked out with a couple of scenic flood ponds and a gym. It looks like a lot of other brand-new neighborhoods around suburban Iowa popping up on former farmland only we don't have a Starbucks. Yet.
Some folks made a hell of a lot of money developing the land in this neighbourhood, which had been farmland until the 1990s.
So, farm families owned this specific land and made money off of it for about a century and a half. Then it was split up into tinier parts and even bigger land "development" wealth grew. After a couple of decades, it's now pretty well "developed." Now it's landlords, individual homeowners, business owners making money from this land.
And that's how it goes.
The people making all of this money were *not* those who ceded this land under duress in the 1800s.
The people making all of this money were *not* descendants of the folks who ceded the land, either.
Take that story of one neighborhood and multiply it for every single city, county, and state in the United States. Expand it to every piece of farmland and ranchland. To every industrial development.
It's trillions. Trillions of dollars.
There's no way to track the spectacular amount of wealth made off of the land in what is now the United states.
This is a tiny peek into one neighborhood and the generational wealth that pale, immigrant settlers got to make here. Some alabaster hued folks came in and started these wealth chains.
But they only got to come in and do that AFTER the Native people were moved completely out of what was to become this state.
I have been alive in this country for five decades and I almost never hear anyone talk about this stuff. About the land they're on. About the wealth that's accumulated from it. About who has it. About who doesn't.
Almost every single inch of land in this country has a similar story.
The only exceptions are the settlements and reservations where now some descendants of the original inhabitants of this place now live.
Here we are with trillions of dollars in wealth made from this land yet there are places in the United States that don't currently have plumbing or running water, or clean non-toxic running water. Some of these communities are made up of descendants of the Native people pushed out of somewhere else almost two centuries ago so that the winners of the wars could live and create lives and make money on this precious land we call the United States.
There's no big movement to shift any of this. How can you make it right? You can't.
We could change policies and shift money around in our society if we wanted to, though.
We could try and find a better balance and some kind of justice for so many of the violent, predatory, oppressive, deadly actions of our past.
We're nowhere close to that. Not even a little bit.
That's partly because the people who built this country built it so that the "landed gentry" powerful pale rural landowners would hold a disproportionate amount of power.
They were damn good at seizing power and land, and at generating wealth for themselves off of both. They damn well intended to keep it.
They still do.
Now here we are in a long moment of reckoning. Because of the structure of this republic, huge pieces of power are still held by wealthy people and by rural states.
Because of pushback to progress from the civil rights movement, these same powerful folks have refused to invest in Americans and in American communities since the 1960s.
The pain from that in our society is deep but those same powerful folks leverage that pain to blame the sources of the problem on everyone but themselves and call it a culture war.
It's resentment and bigotry and fear all mixed together to hold the status quo in which the powerful stay powerful.
But the power doesn't have to stay in the hands of these same people.
We're also a democracy. We can leverage the power of the majority to push back on that old old old old old power and wealth. EVERYWHERE.
We can leverage the power of the majority to build a different future in which everybody has a better chance to flourish and thrive, and where vast old injustices and violence can perhaps be balanced out in some way.
That’s not a bunch of hippie dippy utopian baloney. It’s deadly serious and if we go after it at scale in huger ways than we’ve done so far, it’s going to take a hell of a lot of courage. In the midst of many things intensifying, likely including threats and violence.
Dreaming isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for the courageous.
There's no easy way to make any of the mess that is this country magically better.
But if the actual majority of Americans had more power to make more decisions, perhaps we could create a more egalitarian society. More balanced. Better for everyone and not so heavily structured to hold and reinforce a very old status quo in which the same kinds of people get to have the power and the money gained long ago from violence and war.
I started this post by saying that I have a question. Here it is. Okay it's sort of a set of questions really.
Are we open to doing big vision for stuff like that anymore?
Do we want to do big things?
Are we up for imagining a different kind of a society... and then for building it?
I'd like to think so, but then I'm an idealist.
I don't know that we can ever realistically or fairly address the very deep wrongs in the bloodbath of our American history.
But maybe if we could build a healthier society in which we actually take care of humans we could find a viable future.
Maybe if we could build a society that centers values and priorities other than wealth we might be better prepared for the increasingly complicated challenges fast unfolding on this planet. Priorities like resilience and sustainability and again - taking care of humans.
I think it's time for us to dream. I think it's time for us to dream about the future of this land we inhabit.
We can do better.
We can do better to honor ourselves and all of those people who came before us. All of them.
Will we?
Are we willing to dream the big dream? To make this country into everything that it says it could be?
We're so damn close.
We could be the world's most diverse multi-ethnic multi-racial democracy that actually operates as a functional and thriving democracy where the actual majority gets to drive the direction for the country.
We're close.
We're close enough that the people guarding the status quo have thrown out the rule books and are doubling and tripling down to hold on to what they see slipping away. It's getting nasty and it's getting dangerous.
So how about all this as a question for Thanksgiving conversation?
Are we willing to dream the big dream? To make this country into everything that it says it could be?
We can get there. Part of how we get there is we get people talking. We get people talking in their networks and with their people. We get people believing that it's possible and being willing to work on it. More so than what we've ever done before. We've got to take it all to another level.
That's something you can do right now this week. Get people talking.
What do we want for our future? Do we want it to look like the direction we're going? Or can we do better? For everyone who's come before us... and for everyone who's coming after us?
I think we can.
So this year for the holiday maybe on top of the gratitude… we can also ask the questions about what we want for our future up in this country. Tough questions. Questions which are even harder to ask in this long moment of war and strife and hate and bigotry and instability and fear. Yet we can chart a different future through this fire.
The future doesn't have to follow the long pattern of violence, patriarchy, oligarchy, and colonialism that are all a part of where this complicated Thanksgiving holiday came from.
We can break that pattern. We already have been. We can create a brighter, better future.
We get to decide if we're going to build it. So let's do it.