How To Tolerate The People Who Birthed You While Enduring The Problematic Gratitude Ritual Known As Thanksgiving
Is this thing on?
As we here in the upper Americas prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, social media is doused with preparatory meme’s, op-eds, and commentary that read like a Barnes & Noble self-help section.
“How to Broach the Topic of Politics at Thanksgiving”, “It’s Ok to Start a Fight at Dinner By Calling Out Patriarchal Systems of Oppression”, “How to Host Thanksgiving with Unvaccinated Friends and Family”, “How to Handle a Vegan Coming to Dinner”, “How to Cope When You’re Alone on Thanksgiving”, “How to Tell Your Parents You Don’t Want Children”, and my personal favorite “Deprogram Your Relatives this Thanksgiving”, a piece that details the ways in which your friends and relatives could be criminally negligent in their worldview and why you should take this opportunity, while everyone’s together, to obliterate their worth as a human being based solely on their opinions. I mean, that is what’s behind the need to lecture everyone, right? Let’s get real. Moral grandstanding is the weaponry of the character assassin.
My first instinct when reading these headlines is to ask: Are we so stupid that we don’t know how to function without legacy media transmitting instructions on how we should respond to existence? Or is this formulaic pablum of blended vegetables really the best they have to serve up? Of all the ways to spin Thanksgiving, I can think of fifty other interesting and unusual things to write about — a compendium of gratitude rituals through history, folklore and stories of settlers and natives coming to know one another, interviews with interesting creative people sharing memories from their families at the holidays, a history of feasts, gratitude through the lens of esotericism and religion, a list of thought-provoking life questions to ask your parents to invite meaningful conversation.
If consciousness is infinite, why are they always bombarding us with this stupid shit?
My next thought after I squeegee my brain clean with some actual creativity is: Are we so completely devoid of tact and decency that we think a nod from social justice meme culture gives us the right to sabotage family gatherings with divisive ideological bullshit? I know I am not alone in noticing the steep decline of culture as we devolve into a society of belligerently self-righteous weaklings caught in the stunted adolescence of thinking we know it all. The pervasive tendency toward feeling like others need to somehow be educated into a place of proper conduct, and thinking Thanksgiving is the time and place to do that, is fucking ridiculous. The inappropriateness of the setting illustrates the emptiness of the sentiment. Those with a desire to effect change and persuade minds do not reduce what is intellectually and spiritually meaningful to egotistical performance art at the expense of everyone’s peace. Anyone with half a brain knows that and yet the best of what media is offering up today is a simmering cauldron of Thanksgiving clapbacks and tribal annihilation strategies. What happened to empathy? Once understood as the act of feeling to the point of knowing where someone else is coming from, empathy has become synonymous with “not punching down”, a subtle hierarchical mind game we play based on the assumption that the experience or ideas of another are of lesser import, and thereby worthy of our pity rather than our understanding.
What should be a time of acknowledging the supreme grace of having family, connection, love, friends, or the peace of basking in our own company if we are alone, has become another instance where memes animate themselves into relevance.
Every family has its shit — some more than others and every now and then it’s almost certain to reach levels of intolerability. I am intimately familiar, having witnessed the bowl of cranberry sauce fly through the air, from the hand of one psychotic narcissist toward the head of another, on more than one occasion. But for fucks sake, have we really become a society of such inflamed ego that we can’t take one evening to restrain the gremlin of righteous superiority and instead look for the commonalities we all share? Look for the good in people and in humanity? The unpredictability of the societal changes we are living through is reason enough to bring good energy, love, and grace into the lives of those around us. Who cares what positions they hold on the endless parade of “issues” designed to keep the 99% dividing into smaller and smaller factions, until any notion of real solidarity is conveniently absent. Who cares?
I can’t think of anything I want to do less than to look for new ways to judge people.
I hereby extend the hand of divine permission to you to enjoy every moment you have in this life experience. You don’t have to look for ways to safeguard yourself against the alternative viewpoints of humanity. You don’t have to find a stance of your own either. You can remain wide-eyed and innocent to the ways this matrix tries to ensnare you into anger and you don’t have to carry guilt, shame, or blame about that either.
People dig for answers as a means of compartmentalizing us and then superimpose their point of view onto the answers we give them as a means of feeling a sense of control. The mechanism of the mind is to maintain equilibrium.
But Nothing is under control. Have a laugh and enjoy yourself.
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