Thanks for Nothing

 Yesterday, on Thanksgiving’s Eve, I drove past a church whose street-facing letterboard sign read, "Will you be thankful or just full?"

I immediately made the uncharitable observation that this particular church was located a roughshod part of town. Surely many of its congregants had reason to lament their present circumstances!

At the very least, I figured, their occupations were likely low-paying or somehow degrading or inflexible or perhaps the entire Unholy Trinity at once; surely their homes were shabby and their cars wheezy and their healthcare spotty.

Were they truly obliged to give the same measure of thanks as their wealthier neighbors presiding in the posh historic neighborhoods situated a few miles away in any direction? 

Of course, all these thoughts make me feel like a massive dickhead. What a cold way to assess the lives of those less lucky!

How elitist! And it's not like I'm exactly getting rich over here with my own professional endeavors. It’s not like I own a summer house or a cool portfolio of stock options or anything.

And isn’t it terribly déclassé to assume poor people live generally joyless existences?

Rich, destitute or somewhere between, we all love our children and our friends and the tenor of our lives, no doubt. Every life, however hard, has some vestigial sheen of pleasure to it, some pinhole moments of daily bliss; I think this each time I pass a rough-looking character at a bus stop smoking a cigarette and am filled with envy for their freedom to puff away on the street corner at 10 am on a Tuesday while I go off to do whichever menial task my life requires.

I likely would have no interest in living that person's life; I just want the joy of that cigarette, its curled, noxious plume, it’s in-the-momentness, its dusty pleasure.

But, wait. That kind of reflexive envy is shitty, too, because it reduces the grindingly difficult lives of the people at or nearer to the bottom to a series of one-dimensional caricatures: cigarettes, tinned weenies for lunch, a can of beer in the afternoon, church and shelf-stable donuts on Sunday.

So what now? Surely I'm not the only middle-class hack who's observed the contradictions and shifted away from them uncomfortably. Luckily, there's no shortage of ways in which I can appease my guilt through charity. It's "Giving" season, and in return for a tax write-off, I can donate old, ugly clothes and tacky furniture and spare cash to any number of worthy causes, then heave a sigh of relief and cast off that oppressive mantle of guilt and carry on with my holiday season unburdened by the specter of churchyard signs reminding me of all the ways life ain't never gonna be fair.

And, for their part, the intended recipients of my modest charity are expected to accept these gifts with a meek countenance, and to keep on counting those darned blessings.

I think the major problem I have with Reflexive Thankfulness Mandates is the problem I have with all blanket religio-socio mandates: they seem engineered to encourage complacency. What if the correct response, upon assessing one’s station in life, is not thankfulness, but hostility and disappointment?

Because as we’ve seen over the past two years, hostility and disappointment at least sometimes change things; they move people to rebel and revolt, to set fire to municipal buildings and topple statues erected to honor rich fuckers who amassed their fortunes through plunder and exploitation. 

These hostilities even occasionally usher in shocks to the stacked social strata, leveling that which was not fairly or soundly wrought anyway, or at least rendering bridgeable the distance still left to jump. No telling if anything will shift, truly and meaningfully, as a result of the social upheavals of 2020 and 2021, but at the very least, it feels culturally tone deaf to tell the careworn classes that they’d feel so much better if only they’d be a little more … appreciative.

I’m not saying don't say thanks if your life is hard but still beautiful, don't say thanks If you need something and someone with more kit offers it to you even though they don't have to.

I'm not saying stop donating those heaps of shitty clothes to the thrift store if you find yourself in the possession of far more than you require.

I am saying that there is no moral or ethical mandate to content yourself with what you’ve got. I am saying that when the wealthiest one percent of the country owns one-third of all shares of stock and the wealthiest 10 percent owns nearly 90 percent of the shares, you get to be annoyed and jealous. You get to feel cheated, screwed, beggared and beleaguered.

You get to make a measured assessment of points and demerits, always. You get to compare and be compared. If you want.

You get to examine your station and find either luck or fault with it, or sometimes both.

You get to rejoice at your circumstances and you get to complain, or sometimes both.

And most of all, you get to get mad. You get to say no fucking thank you to this. If you want. Even if saying it totally kills the vibe of a racist, tacky Colonio-Capitalist holiday like Thanksgiving — a meat-and-sugar-coated tribute to plunder and gross, gaslighty historical revisionism if ever there was one.

You get to want way more than whatever it is you’ve currently got. And thank God, at the very least, for that!