Thanksgiving makes the year wobbly

Self-denial does not come easily to us. In this country, it seems that we can put up with a lot, if it doesn't require sacrifice. As evidence of this, I'd like to tell you about a missing holiday.

I am annotating the diary of Mahala Ramsdell Tufts, my wife's great grandmother. In 1867 she documented her graduation from Maine Normal School (a name for a teachers college that survived well into the last half of the 20th century) and the beginning of her first year as a teacher.

So I found myself bemused as I researched the historical context of an 1867 diary. There was a puzzling entry.

Thursday 4 April
Fast Day. Got up at six o'clock and went to meeting. Also at 11 o'clock.

"Fast Day?" I wondered. "What Fast Day is this?"

At first I thought it must be a religious holiday. I checked the calendar for her father's religion, Universalist ... nothing. She had been going to meetings with some Freewill Baptists ... still nothing. Then I cast my search a little wider and found it.

Until late in the 19th century, the governors of New England states proclaimed an annual Fast Day in early April (you can find more information on the New Hampshire, Wikipedia, and Plimoth websites). For many New Englanders, the Fast was a holiday with a lengthy mid-week church service as its focus. With Thanksgiving, it bracketed the Northeast states’ growing season.

When originally devised, it was a day of prayer and "humiliation". The latter word did not have the overtones of ridicule and embarrassment that form the current meaning, but instead meant to humble oneself.

But soon it became the day in early Spring when all citizens were expected to fast, attend the church or meeting of their choice and pray for a good season ... and not just for farming. Here is the text of Samuel Adams' proclamation of Fast Day for the year 1796:

Commonwealth of Massachusetts
By the GOVERNOR
A Proclamation
For a Day of SOLEMN FASTING and PRAYER.
It being our indispensable duty by Prayer and Supplication to acknowledge our dependence on Almighty God, and in a Public and Solemn manner, to implore the Divine Blessing upon all the concerns and interests of our Nation and Land: And the season of the Year now approaching, wherein from the Days of our pious Forefathers, it has been the Practice to make United Supplications to Heaven for Direction and success:

I HAVE therefore thought fit, to appoint: And do, by and with the Advice of the Council, appoint THURSDAY, the thirty-first day of March next, To be observed throughout the Commonwealth, as a DAY of PUBLIC FASTING and PRAYER. And I do exhort the people of all Religious Denominations, to assemble in their respective Congregations on that Day, and with true contrition of Heart, to confess their Sins to God, and implore forgiveness through the Merits and Mediation of Jesus Christ our Saviour; and to seek to him, by fervent and humble Prayer

• That it would please Him to guide and prosper the Administration of the Government of this Commonwealth.
• That He would bless the Public Councils and Determinations of the Federal Government of these States, giving them Wisdom, Firmness and Unanimity, and directing them to the best measures for the Public Good.
That He would be pleased to preserve and strengthen the Union of these States, and that no designs against them shall prosper.
• To bless our Allies and render the Connection formed with them mutually beneficial.
• That He would give a Public Spirit to all Persons whatsoever, especially to such that are in Civil Authority, and endue the People with the Spirit of Piety, Truth, Harmony and Concord, and with a just sense of the value of the Liberties and Privileges they enjoy under Constitutions founded on the legitimate Principle of the Rights of Man.
• That He would be pleased to bless our Husbandry, and so order the Seasons, as that this Year may be crowned with a plentiful Harvest.
• That He would prosper our Trade, Navigation and Fishery, and give success to all our lawful undertakings both Public and Private
• That he would continue Health to us, and prevent the spreading of any mortal or contageous Sickness.
• That he would put a stop to the progress of a Spirit of Profaneness and Impiety, and that great dissoluteness of Manners which threaten us with heavy Judgements, unless we speedily Repent and Reform.
• That the rod of Tyrants may be broken in pieces and all oppression cease.
• And that the glorious reign of the Prince of Peace, may be established through the Earth; so that Man may no longer be the Enemy of Man.

AND it is earnestly recommended to all Citizens throughout this Commonwealth to observe the said Day, as set a part for Religious Worship, and to abstain from all servile Labor and Recreation thereon.

GIVEN at the Council-Chamber, in Boston, the twenty-ninth Day of February, in the Year of our Lord, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-six, and in the Twentieth Year of Independence of the United States of America.
SAMUEL ADAMS.
Attest.--John Avery. jun. Secretary
GOD save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!

As you might assume from previous posts, I am not a follower of any organized religion, I suppose that I could be classified an agnostic, but still ... I like this proclamation. In fact, I like the idea of the holiday.

I like the balance of starting the growing season with a fast and ending with a feast. There is a certain rightness to it. A sacrifice in Spring for the bounty of the Fall.

It seems a shame that the surviving celebration has become a glutton's holiday, that we are willing to gorge without a sense of true thankfulness, that we feel entitled to the reward without paying the price.

But these are the musings of an irritable old curmudgeon who likes the idea of balance, who thinks that reward without effort is an empty accomplishment, and one who would like to suggest that perhaps ... just perhaps, this coming Spring might be a good time to re-institute an old tradition.

Oh, and by the way ... I hope you have a Thanksgiving celebration that is warm, peaceful and full of hope.

Thrift

I've lived and traveled all over the world, but mostly I have been a resident of one or another of the New England states. I have been lucky enough to have met some people with the old yankee outlook on things.

There is much about these yankees that many would consider insular and anachronistic ... what tourist bureaus would call "colorful". But they are a dying breed and I am sorry about that.

I am particularly sorry that they have been caricatured to the extent that some of the lessons that they could teach us have been diminished to the point that we no longer see the virtues as anything other than quirks, fodder for jokes, funny postcard content.

That is a shame, for at the base of the yankee character is the stuff that made this country great, and some of those attitudes, which to many seem quaint, could teach us how to stand tall again.

We laugh at the old story of the man who stops to ask a farmer for directions to a town. The farmer ponders several different routes then finally opines that "You can't get there from here." How dumb could this farmer be to not even know how to get to a nearby town? How foolishly self-centered not to realize that you can get anywhere from anywhere.

But let's think about it. This farmer cannot give directions to the town because he doesn't need to know how to get there. His world, his life is the farm. For him, the town is a place to go only when you must, and only for a purpose. He'll go to the closest town to buy what he cannot make himself, and that is very little. His knowledge is centered on self-sufficiency. He does for himself and for his family and neighbors. He may not know the way to that town, but he knows how to tease a crop of corn out of rocky soil, how to sharpen an axe, how to build a house, how to dig a well.

To him, the fool is his questioner. The farmer would not start plowing, or framing a barn without a plan, but this traveler has set out on the road without one. Why do we consider the lost traveler the smart person, venturing out on the road unprepared? Why is the farmer foolish simply because the traveler has asked him a question the answer to which the farmer has no need to know?

But I seem to be drifting into a rant and there is one of these yankee characteristics that I want to talk about today. It has to do with my recent article on waste.

I posted a story on this blog a while ago about a miser who recycled his first wife's gravestone for use as a cooking stone. The story works because the degree of thrift seems to us to be outrageous ... and perhaps it is. But then, with all due respect to Thomas Lynch and his brethren in the funeral industry, perhaps the profligate use of natural resources to memorialize a dead body is a bit outrageous as well.

Personally, I would prefer to be ground up, reduced to compost and used to fertilize a garden. As the Fugs once wrote in their delightful "Burial Waltz":
"Do not surround me with wreaths of flowers
nor place upon my body the signs of a fetish
nor crescent, cross, phallus nor sun.
But bury me in apple orchard
that I may touch your lips again."

As an historical researcher, I am grateful that my attitude is not common, but I understand the miser's point-of-view that the needs of the living trump the memorializing of the dead.

When I see a cemetery, the neatly mowed lawns of a suburb, golf courses, parking lots, I think of waste ... waste of resources, waste of opportunity. When I see 15-room McMansions built for a family of three and costing a small fortune to heat, or SUVs with gas tanks that cost a day's pay to fill, I think of the small rooms of old New England farmhouses that minimized the use of fuel.

And isn't it odd that our response to this waste is to computerize and add new devices to the mix, as if saving oil by building controls justifies adding the poisonous by-products of their manufacture into the eco-system.

Why is it that we find the yankee virtue of thrift so hard to implement?

There's a magazine that I've seen, I think it's called "Real Simple" (I can't be bothered to check right now). I was leafing through it one day and found myself simultaneously amused and irritated that nearly every "simple" solution involved buying something. What an oddly perverse idea.

Sadly, it's too common an idea. Our concept of fixing is to replace. Our idea of thrift is to add. We no longer make do.

I've been grumbling on for too long, so I'm going to bring this to a close with a few facts, a prediction and an anecdote.

In spite of the fact that new oil reserves have been discovered lately, the earth is a closed system and at some point we will have succeeded in moving it all up to the surface.

This makes most people think of higher gas prices and alternative fuels.

But think of this ...

Asphalt is a petroleum product. When the oil is gone, there won't be anything left to patch our roads for the alternative energy cars.

Look around you. How much of what you see just in your room is made of plastic? Just the shopping bags you use to bring stuff home from the store take 12 million barrels of petroleum a year to make.

Think of this ...

Many medical devices, both high and low tech are made of plastic. disposable syringes, medical pumps, artificial hearts, eyeglasses, and on, and on ...

I predict that in the, not-too-distant, future there will be a new occupation. Perhaps it will happen, as a happy parallel to the gold rush of 1849, in 2049. The new 49ers will race to stake claims on landfills and dumps, where they will dig mines to extract the new gold ... all the plastic that we've so casually discarded for all these years. Most of us will pay small fortunes for medical devices made from the recycled plastic. The rich, of course, will have it molded into jewelry in order to show their status and ability to waste.

Now for the story.

Many years ago I lived in a small town here in New England. Town meetings were always a treat. At one of them there was a heated argument over the state of one particular road in a thickly settled area near a lake. The residents of that area were upset that the road had not been repaired in some years and that the pot holes were causing damage to their cars. Eventually the repairs were voted on and approved.

The next motion was an addendum. A committee of parents many of whom were the same people that proposed the road repair, rose to request that the repairs should include speed bumps in order to prevent reckless drivers from endangering the children who walked along or played near the road.

The debate had barely begun when an older man got to his feet to be recognized. He was one of the oldest citizens of the community and had lived there all his life.

The room quieted with respect.

"It seems to me," he said, "that we're talking about spending money on a problem that has solved itself."

When the vote was taken again. the road repair was revoked.

How to make people happy

The following passage is from a book published in 1841, "The Early History of New England" by Rev. Henry White.

"Mr. Winslow, returning from Connecticut to Plymouth, left his bark at Narragansett, and intending to return home by land, took the opportunity to make a visit to Massasoit, who with his accustomed kindness, offered to conduct him home. But before they set out, Massasoit secretly despatched one of his men to Plymouth with a message, signifying that Mr. Winslow was dead, carefully directing his courier to tell the place where he was killed, and the time of the fatal catastrophe.

The surprise and joy produced by Mr. Winslow's return must have satisfied even Massasoit's ardent affection, when the next day he brought him home to his weeping family. When asked why he had sent this account, both false and distressing, he answered that it was their manner to do so, to heighten the pleasure of meeting after an absence."

Waste not

Today is Blog Action Day

In an earlier post, I reprinted a recipe for brawn, a dish similar to head cheese. The recipe used to be a common one, but these days, here in the US, it is a rare cook who will make it. There are several reasons for this; people don't cook on the scale they once did, butchering is no longer a local activity and the cost of transporting the raw material is exorbitant, factory farming and the disturbing feed given to the animals have created new diseases to be wary of, factory butchering and the filth of the process makes even the most pristine looking cuts of meat suspect.

These are all factors that must be kept in mind. But there is another overlying factor that keeps these processes in place. Even the poorest of us is too spoiled by distance from reality to understand what we are eating.

Let me be clear. I am neither a vegetarian nor an animal activist. I like both tofu and beef. I am as happy with a meal of barbecued short-ribs as I am with one of tabbouleh, hummus and pita. I have no philosophical or religious aversion to having an animal die to make a meal for me. What bothers me though, is the waste and the disrespect for the life lost that is at the base of our thoughtless consumption.

Tony Bourdain talks, in one of his books, about visiting a farm that belonged to the family of one of his cooks. In his honor they decided to have a feast and, to that end, shortly after his arrival they slaughtered a pig. His description of the process, to many people would seem horrifying and even perverse. To me it was beautiful.

Every part of the pig was saved and used. Nothing was wasted. The blood, the internal organs, the feet, the head, all of it was salvaged for use. The idea of throwing out any portion of an animal that had died to become their food would not have even occurred to these farmers. The greatest honor you can give is to use it all.

I like Bourdain, and after reading that description I liked him even more. It was obvious that he was going for the shock value, yet at the same time he made it clear that this was the way it SHOULD be done.

How have we become so insulated from the very food that nourishes us, disgusted by bits and pieces of animals that were the main source of nourishment for our grandparents?

I suspect that the culprit is greed; the greed of corporations wanting to sell only the products with the highest mark-up and our own greed nurtured by a perversion of the American Dream that each of us, can live like the rich even if we are not.

The term "conspicuous consumption" first appears in Thorstein Veblen's book "The Theory of the Leisure Class". and originally described how members of the upper class used their wealth to demonstrate their social standing.

These days it describes how those with expendable incomes buy products to enhance their status rather than to satisfy a true need. There is a theory that the industrial age changed our lifestyle and created a habit of fashionable consumption.

In China, not so long ago, women's feet were bound and their ability to work destroyed, in order to make them more attractive. But what was the attraction? Uselessness. A woman with bound feet was, or at least was intended to be, an unproductive luxury for the well-to-do. She was a drain on resources that only the wealthy could afford to have in their household. In the United States, we have the same fascination for the 'dumb blonde', a rich man's plaything, a status symbol. I guess that there must be some deep and complex set of psychological triggers that attract us to the luxury of being able to reduce others to mere furniture for our lives.

Much of this degradation of women has become diluted in real life, although the various media seem to cling to the ideas tenaciously.

But even though women may be freeing themselves from these idiotic archetypes, the notion of showing power through waste and uselessness still pervades today's society. Limousines and SUVs guzzle gas. Huge masses of fertile land are chemically treated and lie fallow as lawns or golf courses, trees are pulped to create newspapers that are barely read before being discarded ... the list goes on-and-on.

Less than one hundred years ago, our grandparents would have been horrified. For them, thrift was a virtue, a useful object was one that was durable, one that could be used again and again.

Let's take, for example, a simple item. We drive to the supermarket to buy a glass jar of spaghetti sauce, drive home park on the driveway next to our front lawn, and take the jar into the house. We dump the contents of the jar into a pan. If we're diligent, we pour some water into the jar to get the dregs out and consider ourselves frugal. We throw the jar into the trash, or, if we consider ourselves 'green', we put it into the recycling bin.

Now let's look at it a different way.

We use a dollar or more of gas to get to the supermarket where we buy some spaghetti sauce that has been made from ingredients that required fuel to plant, cultivate, harvest, transport, refrigerate, cook, and package in jars that required fuel to make, sterilize, transport, fill, label, pack (in boxes that have gone through a similar process), transport, store, transport again, store, display in a buidling that requires even more fuel for temperature and lighting. Then we dump the pre-cooked food into a pan and use more fuel to re-cook it. Then we throw the jar away or recycle it. The first wastes the energy that went into its creation, the second wastes the energy that goes into its recreation.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm not even going to get into the energy that goes into creating the machines that do the processing, or heating the water for washing dishes. I could also rant about the savings in energy if we were to grow the food in our backyard, but the fact is that it's like a huge line of energy consumption growing and sucking down the fuel so that we don't have to expend the effort that our parents and grandparents did.

Are you going to hear a call to action? A list of simple things that you can do to stop this insane waste?

No.

There are no simple solutions ... no one size fits all. I'm not going to tell you to grow tomatoes in your backyard or get a smaller car, or re-use the glass jars you normally discard.

That would be too easy. You will get into the habit and it will become a kind of knee-jerk, feel-good action that might or might not have any effect.

No. What I want you to do is much harder than that, and much easier.

I want you to think.

When you cook the spaghetti sauce, when you drive, when you wash the dishes, when you take a shower, think about the fuel and resources that you are using. Ask yourself about the plastic, the soap, the food, the fuel, the storage think about it all.

Try to justify it. You're a logical intelligent person who has been seduced by having things made easy, by having things done for you, by having it made easy to NOT think about what supports your lifestyle.

I'm not going to make the same mistake.

Think about it. Understand what powers your ability to waste, justify it, rationalize it.

... and if you can't, I'm sure you'll figure out for yourself what you need to do.

THINK DAMMIT!