Six Years Ago Today: Let’s talk turkey

By Tom Lowe
(1945-2014)

[Originally published on November 22, 2012. Corrected a typo.]

Turkey Day was how I thought of Thanksgiving when I was young. The odor of the bird roasting, helping prepare the homemade dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and yams. Our family was spread out over most of the West, so the scene is just my parents and myself. It was the next day that I really waited for – turkey sandwiches, really pretty simple: bread, mayonnaise, and meat.
    And that’s the part I hung on to over the years, and will again this year, although now the bread will be sourdough, the Turkey from a deli, a slice of red onion, and lingonberries rather than cranberries. Over the years I have celebrated Thanksgiving with friends, at community dinners sponsored by various groups, and find it a day for memories of those gone from my life.
    In many of our minds Thanksgiving is a Norman Rockwell scene, from the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. “Freedom from Want” was published in the March 6, 1943 issue, one of four covers of the “Four Freedoms” derived from FDR’s State of the Union Address, delivered on January 6, 1941. They are: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. During WWII the four paintings were made into posters with the head “Why We Are Fighting,” becoming iconic images for the home front. The concept of the Four Freedoms became the personal mission undertaken by Eleanor Roosevelt regarding the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, General Assembly Resolution 217A. The “Four Freedoms” were explicitly incorporated into the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed the highest aspiration of the common people,....

    Lincoln declared the first official Thanksgiving Day in 1863 on Thursday November 26th. In 1941 FDR formally made the fourth Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day. The Thanksgiving Day Parade was started by Macy’s department store in New York City in 1924, and spread to other cities where Macy’s has done business over the years. A friend of mine has always watched the parade with family, and makes trays of “Sticky Buns” that friends stop by to share. The parade for many years marked the start of the Xmas season, with “Black Friday” sales the day after Turkey Day. This year people started lining up at some Walmart stores as early as the Monday before, but may find themselves encountering OUR Walmart, a group of Walmart employees who are organizing a Black Friday walkout.

Let’s serve up a little side dish of crow. The mythology of the “First Thanksgiving” is that Pilgrims and Indians sat down together to celebrate the first successful harvest of 1621. The reality is that without the local knowledge of the natives, Plymouth Plantation would have gone the way of Jamestown. Longfellow’s favorite Pilgrim Father, Miles Standish, was among the first to demonstrate his gratitude with the Wessagusset Massacre in 1623. Later “thanks” got by native Americans included the Trail of Tears for the Cherokee (1838), Wounded Knee for the Lakota (1890), and Pine Ridge for the Oglala Sioux (1973). Starting in 1879, a policy was instituted of forcibly removing children, placing them in Indian Schools usually far from their families, and prohibiting the “students” from speaking their native tongue or maintaining any connection with their culture. More than 100,000 children are estimated to have attended an Indian School. Today Native Americans, whether on a reservation or “urbanized,” have the lowest income, shortest life spans, and highest alcoholism rates of any group in the United States.

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Lowe, 2018 by Moristotle