A Thanksgiving Reckoning

For the holiday weekend, let’s raise our eyes up from the murk that Donald Trump and his minions spew. Let’s think about what we need to do to make this a better country. That’s not just one thing. There will be many. But I think this is foundational.

The United States has unfinished business that keeps returning. Issues in our past must be reckoned with. I don’t know exactly the form that reckoning will take, but I know that it will require that we be able to grapple conceptually with those issues and repair their damages.

I suggest that these are the ones that keep tripping us up.

• Native American genocide
• Slavery and the failure of Reconstruction
• Full citizenship for women
• Relations with the rest of the hemisphere
• Two epidemics: AIDS and COVID

I’ve put them in a sort of chronological order. Please do not argue about the order. I’m fine with any other order, too, and that’s not the point. All of them have continuity to events in the present, and there is much overlap among them. Each presents a different lens through which to view the American experience, and thus to find better ways of governing.

Each manifests in particular ways at different times. Today, the refusal to grant full citizenship to women manifests in the Jeffrey Epstein affair. Women who were abused by Epstein as girls have fought for decades to make the situation known. Only by knowing what transpired and how can we prevent it from happening again.

The people who acted in the middle of the twentieth century to mitigate the wrongs stemming from slavery addressed specifics. The ability to use public transportation was one. Activists focused on the segregation of public transportation with sit-ins begun by Rosa Parks and continued to press the customs and laws that disadvantaged Black people in using a service their taxes helped pay for.

It’s important to address specifics to provide a platform for a larger view. Without those specifics, the larger view gets lost in abstraction and scolding.

Activism after World War II began a movement that expanded to address other historic wrongs in the list. Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party are trying to roll back the progress that we’ve made.

We were starting to find ways to reckon with them. We can continue to do so and push back on Trump’s destruction. Could today’s issues take down Trump? Perhaps. But these issues are more important in themselves, to preserve what we have and to lay a basis for going forward. Taking down Trump would be a good thing, but even better is reckoning with these issues.

Added: I am focusing on specific wrongs done to specific groups of people. We see the world through specifics, and specifics are most likely to speak to people. So I’ve tried to tie my list to specific events – the first two are obvious; I thought in terms of women’s suffrage for the third, and relations with the rest of the hemisphere are through colonialism and wars around the turn of the 20th century. Comments are going straight to the ills of capitalism. You can pull up a lot of specifics for that, but the connections will never be as specific as the deaths from AIDS. Capitalism and income inequality are part of all of the issues I’ve listed. And if you work it that way, you’ve got specifics.