Thanksgiving Hopes

In some ways Thanksgiving 2009 seems not all that different from the Pilgrims’ landing on a craggy slab of Massachusetts coastline long ago.

The Pilgrims of long ago were facing a world of which they knew nothing – just as the current economic environment seems a landscape which many of us are wholly unfamiliar.

For the Pilgrims, most anything that could have gone wrong on their journey from religious intolerance to the New World did; Murphy’s Law applied exponentially.

Beyond the miles they had been willing to foray on foot from the sea and their ship, they knew nothing of this land, nothing of what and who might be there, in fact initially the thought never seemed to have crossed their minds that there would be anybody there.

The ground was not suitable for crops, at least not with the rudimentary tools they carried and the lack of knowledge of the soil, the viability of what they knew to grow back home in Europe.

Game seemed scarce. The weather conditions atrocious even for hardy men and women of the English and Dutch stock they were.

They were literally in an unknown world, having, by the standards of the day, essentially traveled to the Moon.

How much that seems familiar to the environment of today.

An environment that save for those of a certain generation none of us have experienced, or at least not to the degree that is experienced in the 24/7 din of today.

Unemployment is near 10 percent, and the unemployment rate does not even capture those who for various reasons are not, can not or will not seek employment in a business climate buffeted by forces that seem – like those Pilgrims – beyond our control.

Political fissions, religious fissions, the growing fissure between those who worry about whether there will be food on the table that night and those who don’t – they all serve to divide, just as the harsh conditions at times came to divide the men and women of the Mayflower.

There is much to make us anxious. This will be a tough Thanksgiving – hardly a holiday in any sense of the word – for many.

But the Pilgrims were taught a valuable lesson by the Native Americans – savages as they initially saw them – who inhabited those shores of the bay in which the Mayflower ultimately anchored for safety of harbor.

For while these men and women weren’t big on modesty in what passed for their dress, talked and behaved in ways foreign to the Pilgrims, they were also large of heart, human beings no matter the color.

What is little understood, but is explained by Nathaniel Philbrick in his book “Mayflower” is that while there might have been a feast of some kind on a date sometime near the end of the Pilgrims’ first year in the New World, it was a product of a bond of community that had been formed.

Thanksgiving, and they did not know it as that and it would not become a holiday for centuries after that 1620’s sit down, was for the Pilgrims something that was played out over more than 24 hours.

The previous winter their very existence was in the balance. The Native Americans could have easily killed them, just as the weather and disease depleted their ranks.

Instead, those Native Americans would teach the newcomers about the land they had arrived at, about hunting, fishing and farming.

They taught the Pilgrims survival. In turn, instead of choosing arrogant isolationism in their new quarters, the Pilgrims in turn reached out to the Native Americans, establishing a bartering system, sleeping in their wigwams, choosing to learn, coming to understand these were just human beings.

Only later, when, what else, territory became an issue, did tension and ultimately bloodshed come to those first Anglo-Saxon arrivals to a New World and those already there to greet them.

So today is a day to put aside the loose ends of life that isolate and divide us to remember the things that bring us together.

No, a community is shown, thanksgiving can be extracted by the most unspeakable of pains, the pain of a mother and father and community who has lost someone special.

That community was on display last week in sending Bryce Nelson to a better place. A line that stretched out the church and around the pavement surrounding First Baptist Church during the viewing, a parking lot and church overflowing during the funeral the following day.

Classmates and friends who had gone off to disparate endeavors coming home, a community, from Wewahitchka to Port St. Joe, coming out to hold the Nelson family, to surround them, to shield and comfort them in this time of horrific tragedy.

 That a young man should pass from this life is certainly no way to desire a demonstration of community, but in this nightmare that is every parent’s it could be found.

That a young man could make such an impact in 19 short years and that his mother and father would be held in such standing and respect that a community would turn out in such numbers to salve as best it could their pain is where community is found.

A community that is unique and special.

And on this day that will be difficult for many, we find thanksgiving in that community, that sense of not being alone.

Discovering that at their most tested they were not alone made all the difference for the Pilgrims long ago.

Our hope on this day is that understanding it today can make a difference in all our lives.