Be Thankful

It’s been two weeks already but thank God that’s over. With Thanksgiving behind us we can get back to all the self-serving, egomaniacal, narcissistic, consumer-oriented hellness that the holidays are all about. In other, less enlightened cultures around the world, including the one we White, Western Europeans all but decimated on this continent in the name of Manifest Destiny, the concept of thankfulness is so integrally baked into the general gestalt that to devote a single day out of the year to concentrate the consciousness of the populace on itemizing those things we humans are thankful for makes about as much sense as a national holiday devoted to highlighting the importance of human skin: it serves a purpose, for sure — our largest organ, keeps the bugs out, etc. But mostly, we let our skin do its noble job without calling a lot of attention to it, other than when it’s not the right color.

Don’t get me wrong. I like to drowse in front of the television, overdosed on tryptophan as much as anyone. I’m not humbugging the institution, just the rather sorry ‘Merican way we need the institution in the first place, ie: Do we really need a single day devoted to the idea of being thankful? One day? Would it make more sense to devote a singular day of the year for an encompassing, collective litany of the things for which we are not thankful? Like the Old School days when we’d literally blame a sick goat for our problems and toss it off a cliff, “Scapegoat” style? We don’t do that anymore, right?

Try this:

Grab a blank piece of paper and a pen.

In the center of the paper, draw a dime-sized black dot.

Walk into the next room and show its inhabitant(s) the paper with the dot.

Ask them to tell you what they see.

Most folks, particularly American folks, will say:

“I see a black dot.”

These are a lot of the same people that spend a Thursday in November every year acting thankfully. Praying about it, even. Reciting lists of blessings. These are a lot of the same people drunk on the notion that the holiday is a vague homage to that poignant Thanksgiving narrative in which the kindly, benevolent Native Americans and the bumbling, flea-bitten Pilgrims sat around feasting on venison and salmon and bundles of rabbit meat, multiple cornucopias filled with yummy stuff crowded onto an overflowing common table, the participants smiling at each other like new roommates.

The black dot in the above exercise represents a very Western, very 21st-century American perspective. Focus is critical. Challenges and opportunities are to be isolated and approached with the zeal of a conqueror. We talk about “kicking cancer’s butt,” and “leading the leaders,” and being “goal-oriented,” all of which implies a dedicated, concentrated approach as opposed to a holistic, comprehensive, dynamic one. When we identify a challenge or opportunity, it becomes the black dot on the page. It’s all we see.

One person’s focus is another’s myopia.

Choose your poison.

Here’s the bit: Truly thankful people express their thankfulness in their daily actions, all year long. They help. They contribute. They donate their time, talent, love and resources. They treat strangers with respect, admiration, even, including strangers they don’t like, strangers that don’t pray to the same god, vote the same way, eat the same food, have the same Facebook friends, wear the same clothes, have sex with the correct gender or share the same pigmentation.

Truly thankful people do those things because they recognize, thankfully, that they, themselves, are not universally liked, their God not universally worshipped, their candidates not universally perfect, their food not universally delicious, their Facebook friends not universally well-informed, their clothes not universally fashionable, their loved ones not universally loveable, their skin not universally beautiful. …no…wait a minute. Correction: Everyone’s skin is universally beautiful. We should devote a day to that fact….

Anyway…In the same way that authentically tough guys don’t need to act tough and smart people don’t need to act smart and rich people don’t need to act rich, thankful people don’t need to act thankful on any given Thursday in November.

Now that Thanksgiving is over, let’s stop acting and Be Thankful. Behave thankfully. There’s so much for which to be dizzyingly thankful, including the freedom to not be.

The white space on the paper is everything the dot isn’t. Call it hope. Potential. Latent success. Joy, even.

Perspective and Focus are not mortal enemies, but they don’t see eye-to-eye.

Thank God.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. Winner of a Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest “Columnist of the Year” award in 2017, his book “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local booksellers, the Pine Knot News office and at killingthedevil.com.