Thinking about the "Let's call it a day of mourning, not Thanksgiving" conversation: Dealing with America's complex history of colonialism is important. But there has to be room for gratitude,

and I think having Thanksgiving as a national holiday is a wonderful thing: a day every year when, as a people, we orient ourselves towards gratitude, with all that that implies. That seems deeply healthy and sane.

There's a flavor that some of the discourse about these things takes that is puzzling to me: it makes it seem as though those thinking about them have just not encountered history at all before: the incredibly bloody and complicated record of the human past.

A lot of conservatives who complain about this seem to think that most who are doing this "day of mourning" are using it as a way to accuse others. That's not my experience.

It feels to me, in those who turn this accusation on themselves, as though they are discovering original sin for the first time. Which can be deeply disconcerting, especially if you have no way to to understand or reckon with it.

I think one issue here is somewhat unresolvable: History is complicated. There are no universal good guys and bad guys. And yet to have a "usable history" for the purposes of national identity, you have to make it simple.

That making-it-simple, for some people, went all one way for a while, or at least it did to a degree: that America is the land of opportunity, that it is a force for good in the world. It seems to me that for others, more recently, it's going all one way in a different direction.

But it's still true that it's still complicated. Solzhenitsyn etc etc etc.

But it's GOOD that it's complicated. Because... agh... Being is Goodness. And the freakish weird complexity of history, of humans on a land, is still, fundamentally, good.

Stories are good. It is good that America exists, and Americans, and all of our families, however riven by Thanksgiving table wars and so on, and all of our friend groups, as we bring strange things to the conversation, and find the common good. And I am grateful for all of this.

anyway now trying to plan a menu