“Thanksgiving Thoughts 2020” Sydney Williams
Thursday is Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday. (And, with sheltering in place, unique to this year!) Like Christmas and Easter, it is a religious holiday, as the Pilgrims who we celebrate, and who landed in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts 400 hundred years ago this month, were escaping religious persecution. But, while the Pilgrims were Christians, this holiday is spiritual in a broader sense. The God we thank when we sit down to feast may be whatever God we choose. After all, according to a 2019 Pew Research survey a third of Americans – 35% – do not consider themselves Christian, but all celebrate Thanksgiving. So, no matter one’s religion, if any, all give thanks for the good fortune to live in this Country.
The Pilgrims were Puritan refugees from England, where they had wanted a simpler and purer church than the Church of England offered. They went to Leiden, Holland around 1610, but returned to England to sail from Plymouth to the new world, in September 1620. Not one of the 102 passengers or 30 crew members would have made that trip without a belief that God would guide them. They crossed three thousand miles of unchartered ocean to an unknown destination, to arrive in November as winter was taking hold.
The Mayflower Society, made up of 150,000 descendants, estimates there are 35 million people who could trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. The concept of the power of compound interest proves the point. Of the passengers and crew members, about one third died that first winter. Most of the rest (about 80 people) stayed. Since I can trace my ancestry back to William Bradford, I know that I am, through his son and granddaughter Mercy Steele, the 11th generation – William Bradford would be my nine-greats grandfather, his genes diluted by the fact that I also carry the genes of another 2047 nine-greats grandparents![1] (Apparently through William Bradford, Clint Eastwood and Hugh Heffner are cousins!) While many children died in infancy, most families were large, as children were assets. If one assumes, for sake of argument, that each family had three children and that twenty-three of the seventy-five survivors had children one gets to 35 million in the 13th generation, my grandchildren’s generation.[2] The actual number of Mayflower descendants may be far higher. Other ships, carrying mostly British subjects, began arriving in 1621. Conclusion: The Mayflower Society, to which I do not belong, is not exclusive.
As science and technology advanced, we became wealthier, but more secular. Science uncovered mysteries, explaining the color of our hair and eyes, our height, intelligence and athleticism. But what gives some people drive and determination, and other none? What provides a moral sense? Can those characteristics be learned? Why were we born and not someone else? What guided a specific sperm to a specific egg? Was it by chance? There are mysteries of life still unsolved. Their presence does not mean an absence of science. Is it not possible that there is a power greater than us?
There is a bigger message in Thanksgiving, something that gets lost in the materialistic world in which we live. Civilities, those actions and words that allow societies to coexist and prosper, are disappearing, and, in doing so, we banish tolerance and respect, and we forget to give thanks for what we have. Growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we were taught simple rules: to honor our mothers and fathers, to respect our elders and to obey our teachers. We were taught the Ten Commandments and had to memorize the Golden Rule. We were told to be polite, to look the person addressing us in the eye and to shake hands firmly. We did not have to agree with everyone, but we were expected to dissent with civility.
Technology has made the world smaller. A two-month voyage from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts now takes about five hours. Through social media and smart phones, we are more connected than ever, but are personal relationships more intimate or less? Have we substituted knowing a few people well for knowing a lot of people casually? Are there roses that go un-smelt? Are there consequences to this haste? In his college newspaper, The Brandeis Hoot, my grandson Alex Williams, in a column titled (with thanks to Dr. Seuss) “Oh, the Places We’ll Go,” recently wrote: “In many ways, we don’t want to make the world a smaller place, to drain it of its wonder and deprive it of its sense of dimension and sprawl.” We need time to think, time to read, time to appreciate one’s own culture and time to talk to strangers and learn something of others. What a difference a hundred years has made. When my maternal grandfather was responsible for U.S. Rubber’s plantations in the 1920s, his business trips would last nine months. He traveled by steamer to Britain, then through the Suez Canal to what is now Malaysia, the largest producer of rubber in the world at the time. He would return, moving east across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, down to Brazil and up the Amazon to Manaus, before returning to New York. The downsides of such trips are obvious. My mother spoke of how much she missed him. It is not a life I would have wanted. But he had time to reflect and to learn other cultures. When I knew him in the 1940s, he always took time to take us grandchildren to ‘Bruin’s Lair,’ a small clearing in the woods where he, who had shot tigers in Bengal, would tell us of the friendly bear we believed existed, but never saw.
Thanksgiving is a day to slow down (except for those cooking), a time to reflect. “The technologies that are inspired from wonder,” as Alex wrote in his essay,” should not take us to a place as fast as possible, but to service the more imaginative inclinations of our human experience.” Thanksgiving is a day to express gratitude. In his London speech from which the rubric is taken, William Jennings Bryan, a great fan of our independence from Britain, reminded his listeners of our dependence on so much. “We did not,” he said, “create the fertile soil that is the basis of our agricultural greatness; the streams that drain and feed our valleys were not channeled by human hands…; we did not hide away in the mountains the gold and silver. All these natural resources…are the gift of Him before whom we bow in gratitude tonight.”
On this particular Thanksgiving, we celebrate without our extended families, but we should still think of the freedom that is ours. We should think of those less fortunate, and of those who live in countries less free. We should remember those who have gone before us, and we should be thankful for our ancestors, from whence and whenever they came. They struggled to come here, so their descendants would live in religious and political freedom and have opportunities for success. We should recall and be thankful for the culture and values taught us by our parents, for they comprise the glue that binds our society.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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