ON THANKSGIVING AND KINSHIP

For decades, I enjoyed Thanksgiving. Each year, we traveled various mileages north to my parents’ or one of my brothers’, or in-law’s, houses. Twelve to seventeen people sat around two, age-defined tables and ate a hearty, redolent, mid-afternoon meal of turkey, stuffing, homemade, tangy, locally (New Jersey bogs!)-sourced cranberries, mashed sweet potatoes, vegetables and some hot, savory soup. It was calmly festive.

Afterward, the males threw and caught a football in the chilly twilight air. Then we all reconvened inside to eat home-baked pumpkin, apple and pecan pies. We had plenty of time to talk about whatever in a warm, cozy indoor setting. There was no hectic, gift-shopping run-up to the celebration. And we usually got the next three days off. It was a convivial, nutritionally-fortifying prelude to winter.

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This year, I proposed bringing to my brother’s stately New England house some of our four-year-old hens, who’ve stopped laying eggs, slaughtering them on a tree stump in his backyard and serving them for dinner. I don’t love the grisly, gristly, labor-intensive process of killing, plucking, gutting and cutting up chickens. And old, laying hens have much less flesh than do the commercial oven-stuffers, plus a more austere texture and flavor. But I think it’s important to understand what goes into putting food on a table. DIY-ing dinner fowl would be humbling and “authentic.” Though the pilgrims couldn’t cook their poultry in a gas oven.

Regardless, you can compensate—at least partially—for tough, dry poultry by slathering on extra cranberry sauce.

I sent out a group e-mail with my back-to-the-land proposal to all who are supposed to attend. No one responded. After the past 45 months, I’m used to having people to whom I’ve sent countercultural messages pretend that they didn’t receive anything from me. So I guess no one likes this latest idea, either. OK, I’ll leave the chickens in New Jersey. Space in our Ford Focus was already going to be tight.

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The full Northeastern wing of our family hasn’t met for Thanksgiving since 2019. We’ve skipped some Christmases, too; though by now, the past four years’ holidays kind of run together in my memory.

The return to a larger group this year raises a series of questions.

Is something still a tradition if it’s suspended for three years? Tradition connotes something that occurs no matter what; you bend to tradition, it doesn’t bend to you. Some opted out of three years of large group Thanksgivings on the very weak premise that somebody might catch a cold from someone who didn’t even have a cold.

Is family still a touchstone and an unconditional support network when that role and expectation were suspended over a media and government-hyped respiratory virus? Aren’t families supposed to apply charitable double-standards to each other; isn’t part of family making exceptions for members? It’s one thing—though irrational—to see asymptomatic strangers as unclean and threatening. But would you stigmatize your own parent, child, sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, niece or nephew in this way?

Will anyone—besides me—mention this intervening period of fearful foolishness that caused this break in tradition? Am I—are we—all supposed to pretend this hiatus—and the past 45 months, overall—never happened? Are we expected to tacitly—albeit unreasonably—agree that hiding from other people, including family members, ever made sense?

Should we pretend that doing so didn’t seriously hurt billions of people around the world, including the adult children around our table? And that the Covid “mitigation” hasn’t dug them a social and economic hole out of which they might spend the rest of their lives trying to climb? While they struggled mightily for many months to find work and were impeded from meeting and making friends and finding mates, didn’t tech, media, government, and Pharma capture trillions in wealth from the poor and middle class and pass it to the rich and well-connected? 

Should I mention at the dinner table that although everyone finally feels it’s safe to meet, many people are reportedly still getting “the virus?” Should I remind them that I’m still unvaxxed and still haven’t gotten sick? Will they fear me less now than they did during the past four years, even though they should have felt protected by their birth certificates and their shots? Would attendees bristle if I observed that the shots that they strongly believed in—or at least submitted to—have not only failed, but injured and killed many, widely damaged immune systems and put those who took them at long-term risk of cardiovascular and reproductive failure and cancer?

During Coronamania, most people, including those at the table, didn’t know they were being scammed. They never asked obvious questions. They followed the crowd and put one foot in front of the other. They didn’t know what, or who, had hit them. They didn’t see where the overreaction would lead. They still don’t.

Many of those who bought the scam think of themselves as open-minded. But will they be willing to calmly discuss any of the foregoing? Or will they default to prattling on about Taylor Swift, some podcast and desserts?

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Thanksgiving is about compartmentalizing. If everything always went well, we wouldn’t need to set aside a day to remind ourselves about all of our good fortune; we wouldn’t have a frame of reference that enables us to distinguish good times from bad. But things do go wrong. So on Thanksgiving, we de-emphasize that which hasn’t gone well and focus on that which has; even if the list of what has gone well is much shorter than that which hasn’t.

If you’re sitting in a warm place, forking and spooning tasty food into your own mouth, are surrounded by people whose names you remember and can get up from the table and help with the dishes, you’re comparatively blessed. This year, as on every day of every year, I’m thankful for these and other blessings too numerous to list.

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Despite how irreparably destructive, depressing and disillusioning the Scamdemic has been, I, too, must compartmentalize. I’m extremely grateful for the many well-written, insightful, affirming messages readers have sent me over the past two-plus years. In general, in life, I don’t seek much affirmation. Specifically, I knew from Day 1 how phony and destructive the Covid interventions were and would be. I didn’t need others’ validation in order to trust my own perception.

But your well-informed and well-composed messages were important because they allowed me to believe in other people. It lifted my spirits to know that not everyone had lost their minds. Your comments gave me a sense of solidarity with humanity that had been slipping away as I witnessed daily the extreme gullibility and strong support for authoritarianism among the vast majority. I loved it when commenters said that I had written exactly what they had been thinking.

I wish I could have found you in March, 2020. I wasn’t Internet-savvy enough then to know where the sane, foresightful people were. I don’t use Facebook or Instagram and didn’t know how to send my message to others. I still don’t know how to reach a wider group, though I might print an anthology of some of what I’ve written.

We eventually found each other; too late and too few in number to prevent the Coronamania train wreck, but at least early enough and in big enough numbers to prevent complete despair and alienation. I suspected that each commenter represented many others who hadn’t heard of Medium, where I first posted, or Substack.

I’ve met some readers/commenters in-person and spoken to dozens of you on the phone all over the US. You are all welcome to e-mail me at forecheck32 at g mail, or call, or stop at my house for a meal. Maybe we can share a very fresh chicken.

After all that’s happened, I feel a kinship to you that’s stronger than that which I feel for some kin. From the depths of my being, thank you for letting me know that you could discern between hype and reality and reason and insanity. We won’t share the same table today. But I’ll be thinking about you all.