This could be the best bonding experience, not just for an office but for any society. It's the one holiday that doesn't center on one religion or another, or a set of community or national values that exclude others. In the fantasy America enshrined in our Thanksgiving origin myth, the Native Americans and the Pilgrims were at peace, nobody thought the other was a savage or a colonizer, and everyone shared what they could. I've seen children's books depicting a Thanksgiving with Black people, Pacific Islanders, people with payes and people with turbans but that was a Unitarian Sunday school and we know what those are like.
Yes, the historical reality is different and we should all know the facts. But we should know the aspirational reality as well. I've worked in countries where everything from your employment and your holiday schedule to your spouse and your vote is all determined by the sect you are born into. It's even in many places stamped onto your passport and you can't have it changed. My friends in the business of running a just nation wish they had something like an aspirational Thanksgiving, a low-key, home-based feast when they can invite people who can't share holidays. I tell them they can just proclaim one. It's not like anyone will stop them -- the identity police patrol existing holidays, but they just don't have the imagination it takes to forbid one that doesn't exist.
Sounds great, they say. But then they think about it. What about the neighbors? When they see this happening, won't they report me to someone? It's not like there is a literal Holiday Strike Force dedicated to stamping out transgressions like this, although some places do have a religious police that might see wrong thinking in such a communion. But there is a climate of mind that can be just as censorious. More so because you can't make an appeal.
As we invest more and more in our own sectarian identities, maybe we can start enforcing the boundaries just as energetically.
This could be the best bonding experience, not just for an office but for any society. It's the one holiday that doesn't center on one religion or another, or a set of community or national values that exclude others. In the fantasy America enshrined in our Thanksgiving origin myth, the Native Americans and the Pilgrims were at peace, nobody thought the other was a savage or a colonizer, and everyone shared what they could. I've seen children's books depicting a Thanksgiving with Black people, Pacific Islanders, people with payes and people with turbans but that was a Unitarian Sunday school and we know what those are like.
Yes, the historical reality is different and we should all know the facts. But we should know the aspirational reality as well. I've worked in countries where everything from your employment and your holiday schedule to your spouse and your vote is all determined by the sect you are born into. It's even in many places stamped onto your passport and you can't have it changed. My friends in the business of running a just nation wish they had something like an aspirational Thanksgiving, a low-key, home-based feast when they can invite people who can't share holidays. I tell them they can just proclaim one. It's not like anyone will stop them -- the identity police patrol existing holidays, but they just don't have the imagination it takes to forbid one that doesn't exist.
Sounds great, they say. But then they think about it. What about the neighbors? When they see this happening, won't they report me to someone? It's not like there is a literal Holiday Strike Force dedicated to stamping out transgressions like this, although some places do have a religious police that might see wrong thinking in such a communion. But there is a climate of mind that can be just as censorious. More so because you can't make an appeal.
As we invest more and more in our own sectarian identities, maybe we can start enforcing the boundaries just as energetically.