Senior class Photos
“There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s me,” is the unimaginative white lie tacked onto the end of too many relationships. Last time I said it was at a wine bar in Edinburgh during their Festival ten years ago, to some poor guy who’d flown out to meet me there. In a recent interview with Accidental Expats I explained why I left the US permanently: “the priorities of my birth country are not necessarily my own. Instead I seek to savor a few of the many experiences that the world offers in different locations.”
Priorities include retailer-driven holidays: Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Hallowe’en. As Kelsey Timmerman wrote, “Black Friday: The day the American Consumer takes full advantage of Cheap Labor around the World.” Where the focus is on sentiment and stuffing faces. Where stuff serves as a distraction from substance.
Thanksgiving’s a particularly ambivalent holiday for me. I went to school with kids from many different backgrounds. Some of my great-great-great grandparents fled European wars to live in the US, while my Hmong friends’ families had fled persecution that stemmed from the American war in Laos. Other friends’ ancestors had been brought over with fewer options: as slaves and indentured servants. Opportunism was in our genes and in our American mythology. But for some classmates, Thanksgiving was a reminder of what they had lost with the pestilence and the underhanded treaties that had squeezed their families onto reservations. Every year we had discussions about the less savory sides of our country’s history, which were rarely addressed in our textbooks.
Perhaps it’s because what American culture I do experience is online and more mainstream now, but I don’t hear much from those voices anymore. As I’ve said before, America’s not the only country with this problem: every time I walk to the train station I pass a mural depicting massacres of local people. I’ve spoken with Cuban painters about the island’s indigenous people who were completely exterminated by the Spanish. But while I’m thankful for so much in my life, as this writer puts it best, “Thanksgiving can never be just a day of thanks”
Fabulous!! Very well written, the best thing I’ve seen published about Thanksgiving this year! Your storytelling skills are superb, and exactly what is needed – a position from which others can question their cherished, if unconscious, beliefs. Bravo girl!
Awesome! I can’t agree with you more. My problem is that in my original birth country there is so much negativism, racism and so much more. I still found more optimism and value here. I miss my country so much, but when I go home I run into a lot of things that make me upset. There are plenty of things here in the US that make me upset or just plain sad. Unfortunately the big companies run world exist overseas as well. Budapest has more malls than the Twin Cities! There are about 6 mega-malls that are almost the size of Mall of America. Very sad. Anyways if we only look at the dark side of the Moon we will never realize how bright the other side is.
@Tamas Thanks for writing. I can understand your reasons for coming to America, and remember the racism against the Romany in Europe. Another reason to come to the US is your lovely wife! She’s somewhere in that school photo too.
@Cat Glad you appreciated the spirit of this post.
I saw a picture in the FT of consumers in a toy store on Black Friday. It was revolting. They were too big. Obviously taking up too much space and resources on this planet and they were grasping and grabbing boxes of toys while their trolleys were already piled high. It was the face of insatiability despite plenty. A modern day version of “The Scream”
It made me wish I were an artist to render that moment in posterity.