Thanksgiving differences

While driving across Indiana today, I heard a characterization of the “first” Thanksgiving that gave me pause: it was an event in which diverse people from two very different cultures, English and Wampanoag, came together for a harvest celebration.  I’d never thought of Thanksgiving as a cross-cultural event.   Without doubt, the English settlers had benefitted from the ideas of the other culture, and merged those ideas they brought over the sea, to solve the problem of feeding their colony. This coming together of different peoples, both to share ideas and to celebrate is a core activity of any creative community: constructive debate and interaction across differences, followed up by action, are the heart to solving complex problems.  While we have not always lived up to this principle of constructive interaction across difference, the power of the principle overshadows our failure to always achieve it.

In 1863, in a time of unparalleled strife, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national event, saying,

“I … invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, … to set apart and observe … a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that ... they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

He meant this message for both the Union and the Confederacy.  This is a remarkable request to a nation torn apart by Civil War, and it is remarkable that both the North and the South observed the day.

Today Thanksgiving is a day to come together with family.  It is notable, and perhaps sad, that this celebration no longer expects the diversity that the first Thanksgiving provided.  We do not often sit down with those very different from ourselves to celebrate how working together had solved a problem.   This is also a year of rancorous political debate, when our leaders fail to truly debate, listen, and act.   If the colonists of Plymouth had used the same techniques, there would have been no more colony.

There are notable exceptions at the University of Michigan, where I know faculty, staff and students who have invited international students over to their homes for Thanksgiving day.  This generosity will be amply repaid, in unexpected and rich ways.

It is perhaps a good time to reflect on those past moments when people truly came together to solve a problem.  These are the moments that make the human community so worth celebrating.