Jacques Callot: Avarice -
Series/Book Title: Seven Deadly Sins (17th century)

"Our fathers grant to thee, expanding liberty, of this we sing. Land where our father's tried to live genuinely Decent lives, protect us by thy light, let freedom ring!"

Continuing their War on Decency, the administration, utterly uninterested in administering anything, continued eroding our foundational liberties by severely wounding one of our most treasured traditions: Thanksgiving, and defiling it by denying food assistance to the most vulnerable thirteen percent of our citizens, thereby eroding the sense of plenty usually accompanying the harvest season, replacing it with a deepening sense of dread. Further, the Federal machinery began dismantling our air traffic control system by withholding air traffic controller paychecks, prompting them to call in sick in record numbers, resulting in a spate of near misses, clear signs of an overloaded system. The administration began shutting down pieces of that system, cancelling service, thereby threatening the usual migrations homeward common to this season. Thanksgiving has this year been subsumed by a deepening sense of ThanksTaking.

Who thought it possible that anyone or anything could deeply wound our native optimism? It was unthinkable, just a year ago, to imagine that Americans would feel unable to authentically celebrate our Thanksgiving holiday. Our traditional gratitudes have been supplanted by platitudes from unfeeling conservatives intent upon dismantling much more than merely our social safety net. Thanksgiving was originally proposed in a presidential proclamation made by Abraham Lincoln in eighteen-freeking-sixty-one! Lincoln, we might recall, was the President who started the whole Lost Cause movement by freeing enslaved people and defeating those defending slavery. This act of supreme Decency has been a source of frustration for those who disagreed that it might have ever been the business of our Federal government to insist upon Decency for “those” people. Their progeny have been fighting that Decency ever since, usually to little lasting effect, though they have remained persistent.

Adding further insult to the eternally festering injury, Franklin Delano Roosevelt codified Thanksgiving into a formal Federal Holiday in the first year of World War II. Through the horrible war years and better ones since, the fourth Thursday of November has been formally observed as a day of thanksgiving, whether or not we’ve had a successful harvest. It was always in our citizens’ character that we could see through a single disappointing season to celebrate upcoming successes, even when success seemed to temporarily evade our grasp. We’d mortgage one year to celebrate the next, and these celebrations sustained us. It makes perfect sense that those still carrying their great-great-great-grandfather’s grudges would target Lincoln’s and Roosevelt’s holiday first, and seek to replace thanks with a particularly virulent form of Avarice. Cut food assistance for those most vulnerable among us. Publish plans to replace a significant part of The People’s House with a Gomorrah-class temple to excessw. Launch plans to undermine what has passed for national health insurance. Send our National Guard to harass innocent citizens. The list of insults seems never-ending.

I feel moved to “celebrate” the usual fourth Thursday in November this year by serving up steaming bowls of gruel to commemorate the past we once sought to leave behind us. Our ancestors did not merely endure their lives. They knew Decency and joy, along with their unimaginable suffering by modern standards. In their time, too, self-proclaimed conservatives rallied against so-called improvements. Vaccine deniers railed against smallpox prevention and cholera-preventing public health standards. However, our intrepid forebears figured out how to live and even celebrate despite the extraordinary complications they faced. We were born blessed by comparison, though too many of us seem to focus on those blessings as if they were damnable curses. Jealousies drive some to commit social atrocities. Grudges encourage retribution against utterly innocent citizens. Power madness persists and continues to fuel capricious decisions.

On this upcoming ThanksTaking Day, the first and probably not the last one in our history, let us remember our blessings past and consider what blessings we might choose to bestow upon our progeny in the future to fuel their Thanksgivings. We will undoubtedly seek to vanquish the present outrageous outbreak of indecency, which has grown into an obscenity and a tragedy. We hold a sacred responsibility to do what we can to transform each emerging obscenity into an absurdity. Replace the turkey with a huge serving bowl of gruel. Spoon it into simple bowls with an enormous serving spoon, with all the pomp and gravitas of any Norman Rockwell rendition of our proud tradition in action back then. If we’re the praying kind, we might offer thanks that we have not been personally consumed by Avarice, but retain our senses, though the world around us suddenly seems crazy as crypto. We will humble ourselves, hunched over our simple bowls of Decency, retaking the thanks they tried to wrest from our Decent and deserving hands. Damn them, bless us. Anyone for seconds?

Our fathers grant to thee, expanding liberty, of this we sing. Land where our father's tried to live genuinely Decent lives, protect us by thy light, let freedom ring!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz