I think I’ve said before that Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday– a reason to be thankful for all the things we have that we want, and all the things that we don’t have that we don’t want.
For me, it’s spending time with friends and family, and thinking good thoughts for all the ones who weren’t as lucky. This is something that’s easy to forget, when we hustle for that extra few bucks, we skip over the fact that we’re making more money than 99.81% of the planet’s population. We are surrounded by wealth.
And yet, with all that, there are people who feel entitled to more… and only they and theirs are entitled, no one else.
David Byrne– yes, the guy in the funny white suit from the Talking Heads– made an interesting reference to this in a post-election day post:
I sense that the balance of power in the house and senate and the rollback of the neocon agenda is only part of the job ahead, as the country has been inundated with bully culture, the culture of greed, for at least a dozen years. For many young professionals, that’s all they know in their working lives — the attitude of winner takes all, bigger smashes smaller and do it if you can get away with it. It might take a while to allow another more humane culture of getting along and nurturing each other and benefiting from each other’s skills and knowledge to rise from the ashes. At present ashes are pretty much all there is. Social animals know better than this — they seem to instinctively know that there are limits to what the bosses and the alpha males can get away with, and that cooperation within the group is how the group survives. Checks and balances — something that’s been missing for a while.
I sense this culture every day, on the streets and in the media. Every time a cop car from my local precinct runs a red light or speeds down a one way street the wrong way (just because they can, no other reason) and every time an SUV with darkened windows muscles other cars, bikers, old ladies and kids out of way — sometimes narrowly missing pedestrians as they run a red light — well, it’s all been sanctioned by Bush and Cheney and the senators and congressmen who allied themselves with these bastards. They reflect and encourage one another. Push in line, build your building right in front of someone else’s, destroy a neighborhood, be a winner, a survivor.
See if you spot it this weekend while you’re driving. You’ll recognize it easily enough, it’ll be the idiot driving on the shoulder or over the median to get past the traffic tie-up or get out of the parking lot. Because he feels he’s entitled to get somewhere quicker than you.
It’s that sense of entitlement that gets me. The people who were born on third base and think they hit triples, and then think that they deserve to lord it over others who weren’t as fortunate, gifted, or just plain lucky. But there’s a special circle of hell reserved for those people who teach and preach that it’s okay to be selfish, to not care about other folks, to think that your good place in the grand scheme of things is because you’re special. That the rules, customs, and laws for everyone else don’t apply to you. That’s the behavior of a spoiled brat. Quoting John Kenneth Galbraith: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” (Driftglass explains it much better than I did here.)
So on this Thursday– the 43rd anniversary of the death of the man who said, “For of those to whom much is given, much is required” and “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”– remember all those who weren’t as lucky, and give thanks to everyone who ever made your life a little bit better.
As for me, I’m heading off Friday to Mid-Ohio Con to cause trouble in the halls. If you’re there, feel free to come up to me and say hi.