Thanksgiving with Rittenhouse and Mason

Tentatively, we gather around the table for an almost normal Thanksgiving this week. Last year, we stayed home, cooked a small meal for our smaller group and told ourselves that this was what we wanted, anyway.

We did this after a few weeks of going back and forth about the big family gathering. Inside? With masks? Outside? Drop by but only for appetizers outside? This was pre-vaccine. It was easier and felt safer to just stay home.

(This year, we will gather, but not with you unvaccinated troglodytes. Your food is in a bowl out in the barn. Enjoy.)

So let me take that back. There’s very little that’s normal about this Thanksgiving. More than 20 months after we first locked down to keep the virus away, it feels like we’re every bit as far from glory land as when we started. Anti-science has lengthened the road. So have people manipulated into thinking that getting a shot to protect the vulnerable among us is somehow a violation of their rights. If you had told me two years ago that people would willfully skip getting a life-saving vaccine in the midst of a killer pandemic, I would have referred you to diseases we don’t much talk about anymore — polio, diphtheria, measles — because vaccines let us conquer them. And I would have thought you were lying. Of course people will get vaccinated, or so I would have thought back in the Before Times.

What shall we talk about around the table? The recent election saw some of the most inappropriate and flawed Connecticut candidates running for local boards and councils, and not all of them lost. We are every bit as politically divided as we were when the defeated and wheezing old king was in office — maybe more so. A difficult court trial exonerated a rifle-toting teenager who shot three people and killed two of them because — metaphor alert — he was frightened someone would take his rifle away from him. We are told that Wisconsin laws make disproving the teenager’s claim of self-defense nearly impossible, but it is difficult to get around the fact that the kid shouldn’t have had that gun in the first place. So he walks free, and right-wing gun-lovers have stuck him up on a pedestal. One would hope Wisconsin legislators fix the mess they created with a bad law.

Our public schools — the gem of our democracy — are under attack from white people who want to make sure their ancestors remain the hero of the stories told in the classrooms. Come to think of it, what most of us learned about this holiday does precisely that — white-wash what really happened and make the white folks the heroes, aided by compliant natives anxious to hand their land over to Pilgrims and their unique brand of Christianity. Where else in the history of time has a people ever so willingly given up their land, their language, their culture to an invading force, save for here in the northeast of the U.S.A.? That particular lie slides right over the atrocities, pain and decimation visited upon the first people who arrived here first.

And there stands the statue of John Mason, sword by his side, presiding over our State Capitol’s north side. Historians, descendants and others are discussing removing Mason’s statue for his role in the massacre of hundreds of Pequots in 1637. One of Mason’s descendants recently suggested before the Capitol Preservation and Restoration Commission that if the Pequots didn’t precisely have it coming, they weren’t friendly to the, well, invaders. They fought back.

And then Mason and his mostly green troops rained hell down on them.

It’s not much of a stretch to say that Mason’s descendant is reaching back through the mists of time to launch a very bad claim of self-defense. Let’s hope the commission and the court of public opinion are better equipped to weigh the truth than was Rittenhouse’s jury.

The first official Thanksgiving was declared by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, partly to mark the decisive Union victory at the battle of Gettysburg. In his proclamation, the president expressed thanks for harvest and “healthful skies,” and said that even in the middle of a horrible civil war, a nation that was not at peace with itself was at least at peace with other nations. The proclamation listed reasons to be thankful: The population had grown, mines were yielding more treasures of ore than ever before, and axes had enlarged the borders of settlements (by removing more trees). None of that bounty came from human endeavor, the proclamation said. It was all due to God.

If President Lincoln can find things for which to be thankful in the middle of an armed civil war, we can as well. We will gather around the table, and some of us will be masked, but we will skip the elbow bumps and hug one another for making it this far. Better days are most assuredly ahead, and for that, we can be grateful.

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker,” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl.” She is a distinguished lecturer at University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.