When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was possibly my favorite holiday. I got to see my cousins, watch the Packer game, and enjoy a really good food coma.
But the food aside, I think I loved Thanksgiving because I liked the story.
You know the one. How these oppressed religious people, the Pilgrims, were being treated so poorly in England that they needed a new life - a clean slate, a place to worship their very pious Christianity. So they took the ultimate gamble. They risked crossing a treacherous ocean to start anew and landed in what we now know as Plymouth Massachusetts in November. When they got there, their store-house of food from the Mayflower was, well, a wee bit on the low side. Being November, they couldn't plant any crops. But God provided for them, and sent them the Native Americans of this new land. And these Native Americans were benevolent, gracious, kind and had what the pilgrims most needed - food. And so right when they found themselves in desperation, the Native Americans asked them to a big meal, where they broke bread together, and shared of their excellent hunting skills, complete with turkey. Friends sat at that first thanksgiving table, shoulder to shoulder, Native American and Pilgrim. And the Pilgrims, well they thrived, they went on to celebrate their religion in freedom and shared kindness in the new world. They got to start over, and have a clean slate.
Now let me say again, I love this story. But after reading Nathaniel Philbrick's book The Mayflower - a historian who went back to all the original journals, letters, official correspondence and land deeds of the time of the Pilgrims - my bubble burst with one big bang. Because the story I was told as a kid, bore little resemblance to the truth of what happened, when these Pilgrims came over yonder.
The one thing that was true - was yes, indeed the Pilgrims were being oppressed in England for their religious views, and came to the new world to start anew.
But here's where pretty much none of the story we have come to know contains anything of what really happened.
First, the Pilgrims came over for religious freedom, remember they weren't farmers they were weavers, wool carders, tailors, shoemakers, printmakers, and well honestly they knew didley about farming, frontiersmanship, hunting, gathering, or fishing in particular, which would have saved their behinds as they were on the coast. So pretty much skill-less, in a lot of ways. Put it this way, much worse off than us without a microwave.
They arrived in November, with no Wegmans on the corner. So they go galavanting around the Plymouth area in search of possible food sources. They happen upon some corn buried in a sand dune. The corn they found of course was the local tribe that was doing a good job of avoiding them, and it seemed to be their storehouse of provisions for the winter and for planting in the spring. So what to do?
They made a choice. They stole all of the corn in the storage house, telling themselves that they could wait to talk to the native people, but hey, they were hungry now, so we'll make up for it later. Unfortunately for the story and for them, they proceeded to do this numerous times, without leaving anything of value in return for their act of stealing. Further, they came upon wigwams, and graves of the natives, and proceeded to dig up and steal the contents from them as well. Obviously not the best way to start off any relationship with a group of people you clearly need as your friends. I wouldn't recommend that strategy, in case any of you are thinking of finding your way in the world. And they didn't seem to have the - thou shalt not steal commandment ringing in their head, strangely for being such good Christians. Puzzling.
Here I think it must be noted that when they came over they weren't all pious Pilgrims on the Mayflower. They were of course accompanied by many single males most of whom were sailors or of the Merchant Adventurers who had helped fund the voyage. But here you are moving to a new place to get a clean start and you've got some, well, ruffians amongst you. So what do you do, you start enacting rules and laws on your own little group. Rules about what you can and cannot do, both in belief and in practice. And before you know it you are creating a community much like the one you were fleeing from but now you are the one doing the oppressing. Again, hmmm, not something I would recommend if you decide to forge your own path, just so you know.
So let's review - so far, a lot of stealing, looting and general domineering behavior. Moving on to even more fun-filled historical truths, these next ones are sure to keep your spirits up!!
The Pilgrims needed land and wood, so in the beginning they started off by talking to the sachems or chiefs of the neighboring tribes, and fumbled their way through what it meant to buy land from the sachems. It should be noted that in these land deals, the Pilgrims thought they were giving a fair price, and indeed their descendents later insisted, "they did not posses one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.'
But OK, fair at times can be relative. In reality the system cut out the Native Americans from the emerging New England real estate market. Because Native Americans could only sell their land to the Plymouth officials, they didn't get the fair market price. You see the officials kept the prices they paid to the Natives artificially low, and instead of being able to sell to the highest bidder, the Native Americans were not allowed to establish what we would call a fair market price for their commodity. And in a few cases, the government made a 500 percent profit on the sale once they had sold the land they had just bought.
On the issue of how to stay safe as a tribe from the English, tribes were encouraged to sign treaties with the colonial leaders of the time to prevent against attacks from neighboring tribes and also the French. But in truth, it was a pact to the English benefit, because what they were offering was an either/or scenario. You are either with us or against us deal. And if you didn't sign the agreement, you were considered an enemy of the Plymouth officials, an enemy of the state.
Ok, to keep this short and not have all of you just plain melt into your seat from a complete depression, I'll cut to the chase. The Native Americans were for all intents and purposes being run off their land, so they formed new allegiances with each other. Which created a war against the English, who eventually systematically decimated a population of people through internment camps, a slave trade - yes, of Native Americans - and war. So, what do we have in the end - a not so happy Thanksgiving story.
If there is any moral to this sad story it is this. Here is a group of people who needed to create a new world. They brought over to this land their hope and the best of themselves. But what they didn't count on or even see in themselves, is they had created an oppressive regime toward anyone who saw things differently than they did and then they topped it off by believing that God's providence ordained their actions.
What they did was bring their baggage with them, but bringing your baggage with you is a very human story! Most often we don't get a true clean slate, we get the illusion of a clean slate. We as humans bring our baggage with us, and often end up repeating the same behavior or patterns that we've done, or was done to us in the past into our present actions. And the moral being, the Pilgrims in the end didn't create a brand new world, they just replicated the old one, with little difference than a simply role reversal, the oppressed now on the top and taking their turn at the oppressor job.
Now I think the moral of the story raises a serious question for us in our time. As many scholars, world leaders, academics, scientists and religious leaders have already pointed out, the challenge in the century ahead for us, for all of humanity is not to tinker or to make things a bit better in our world but to literally create a brand new world. We need to relate to energy use in an entirely new and radical way; we need to develop an entirely new way of dealing with war and international conflict and terrorism; we need to figure out an entirely new way of dealing with world wide poverty; and we need to entirely rethink our current nation-state divisions and think in brand new ways about being one human family all in this together! Whew! A lot to make brand new isn't it. And so the question for us is - Can we do it? Or to frame it in terms of our monthly worship theme, when it comes to the ability to create a brand new world, are human beings a good bet?
And the sad thing is: If you look to the Thanksgiving story, it seems to say the odds aren't that good. It is very hard to believe that human beings can create a whole new world without replicating the past. Because what it is going to take is radical sharing, some likely uncomfortable sacrifice, and people who really begin to live simply so others can simply live. And there are times, frankly more than I would like to admit, that I don't see it happening. We humans are animals after all, all just struggling to get our needs met, much less pause long enough to confront our patterns, our rampant desires, analyze our failings, regroup, reassess, and realign ourselves. Besides, we are competitive by nature, we are told. And everywhere I look, this holds true. It certainly was true for the Pilgrims, they competed for land, resources, and ultimately control. In modern day, companies are competitive and cut-throat amongst each other. Schools are competitive with each other. We each find our team and root for them. Countries are competitive with each other. In the global, national and local markets, competition seems the one innate piece of our programming as humans. And then I talk to my pessimist husband, and all seems lost. You have to scrape me off the floor with a spatula, to pull me up. But even when the odds seem particularily against us as humans, I've found hope, in a modern thinker, who reminds me that maybe competition is not really who we are at our core as human beings, maybe there is a different way.
"In 1959, David Korten was in his senior year at Stanford University and he took a class in modern revolutions. And there he learned that most communist uprisings grew out of the "desperation of the poor." And it was then that he decided to dedicate his life to spreading the U.S. model of capitalism abroad. He envisioned a world he said, where impoverished peoples could 'all be rich, happy consumers like us.' After getting a Ph.D. from Stanford's business school, he joined the US. Air Force and spent nearly three decades working in international development in Africa, Latin America and Asia. But his time overseas slowly transformed his view of his nation's role in the world, because he saw firsthand the negative impact U.S. business practices and foreign policies had on the economies, political systems and environments of other nations. As his dismay at the US system deepened, he came home to tell others about it. And wrote his bestseller, When Corporations Rule the World, which is now required reading in many college level business and political courses." - The Sun
In his new book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, Korten describes how humanity has indeed arrived a this crossroads: The earth's carrying capacity is reaching its limit pushing us to a crisis point. "We either transform our social relationships in the direction of community and partnership," he writes, "or we continue on a basically suicidal path of social and environmental disintegration." He believes that the key to the turning is to change our cultural narrative - the archetypal stories that define a society's values.
To change the narrative means to change the story. But it means changing our habits, and baggage right? And here is where Korten tells us it is possible to move from the competitive model, held onto for the last 5,000 years, to a cooperative model.
His first must is to stop engaging in violence as our means to end conflict. He writes, "What we've so often seen is that, even if an armed revolution is successful, the imperial system remains, because the people who lead revolutions generally are not the most egalitarian among us. Once the new rulers get into power, they are sitting on the same old throne, and to stay in power they have to maintain those imperial structures. Sometimes they act benevolently, but more commonly they are as ruthless as the despots they replaced." - hmmm, sound familiar, like the Thanksgiving story perhaps?
So what is the alternative? A cooperative model, of self-organizing. But can it be done? You bet! He says, look to the massive demonstration on Feb. 15th, 2003 against the war in Iraq. It was estimated that 20 million people participated in a unified protest across the planet. Did it stop the war? No. But it gave people a taste of what self-organizing can look like and how we can work to cooperate on a global scale.
He also points to biology which has usually been regarded as the primary model of competition, think Darwin and the survival of the fittest. But new biologists in the field - primarily women - are pointing out that living systems are fundamentally cooperative. They argue that "Obviously there are competitive dimensions, but life can exist only in cooperation, sharing relationships with other life. Energy is constantly flowing back and forth among organisms. Just as it is among the cells of a single organism. So it's constantly balancing the individual interest with the collective interest." - The Sun
As Korten says: "Healthy living organisms and ecosystems are constantly balancing individual and collective needs. Each depends on the other. That's how we need to function in societies, and I think it's the dynamic that's arising in the new global-justice movement."
After reading Korten, I must say I agree with him. Since we are past tweaking and need to start anew, we need to adopt a new framework, one that moves from the competitive to the cooperative.
As religious people, his model fits with who we are called to be in the world. We are indeed called to be cooperative in our lives, to radically share, to live simply so others can simply live, to see ourselves in another's eyes, to know that we are all God's people, or in more UU terms, that each person has inherent worth and dignity.
Surprisingly in the end, maybe the Thanksgiving story, does give us the story we need to begin again. The story of our childhood, has a lot to show us about how to move from competition to cooperation. Because if you don't look to the historical facts, the story shows us what people can be, not what they were. And in the end, we need as many models, stories, theories, and inspiration of what we can become that we can get our hands on. So with that, here's to the Pilgrims and the Native people, may we live into the myth, and let it shape who we are meant to become, so that we will indeed all sit at a table one day - breaking bread together. Amen.
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