Giving thanks, giving back, and envisioning what we need to accomplish in 2021 and beyond
By: Gail Mcnulty
Tags: Black Friday, BlackLivesMatter, Indigenous Rights, Thanksgiving, White Supremacy

As we prepare to give thanks with our shelter-in-place friends and family while sharing tips and recipes in family Zoom gatherings, let’s reflect on all we have learned in 2020 and look to 2021 with new eyes rather than a goal to return to ‘normalcy’.

If we are lucky enough to have a Thanksgiving dinner, let’s think about the people who have harvested and handled our food — and food for people everywhere — through a smoke-filled fire season, climate intensified storms, and a global pandemic — sometimes visiting food pantries to feed their own families.

Let’s also remember the Indigenous People who once stewarded every inch of the land we call home, grateful for all they had and mindful of the need to live in harmony with Nature. If you’re looking for a film to enjoy with your family, consider watching Gather, “an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide.”

As we give thanks for the vaccines on the horizon and the new president soon to be in the Oval Office, let’s think carefully about what we have learned from news stories about why BIPOC communities and our nation’s ‘essential’ workers have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19 and why this year’s Black Lives Matter protests inspired an unprecedented dialogue about the unfair realities of our greed-driven, white supremacist culture. In reality, our nation — founded by land-owning white men for land-owning white men with an economy built on the pain and suffering of enslaved Africans, the betrayal and murder of Indigenous People, and the mindless domination of Nature — has been heading toward the disasters and disruption of 2020 since its birth.

When we wake up on ‘Black Friday,’ let’s think deeply about how we can and must give back rather than diving into cyber sales to get deals on the newest gadgets. Those 3D building pens look incredibly cool until you think about the fact that our world is already drowning in plastic; it’s everywhere from the arctic to our dinner tables. We’ve seen dissected animals with stomachs packed with our plastic trash but we don’t yet know what the fabricated toxins we consume daily — perhaps as much as a credit card a week — are doing to our bodies or our children’s.

Rather than supporting Amazon and rewarding Jeff Bezos, one of many billionaires who profited off the pandemic, spend your dollars supporting local businesses who are scrambling to keep their doors open.

Let’s work together to ensure 2021 becomes a turning point — the year we instill a moral compass at the heart of our country and use our nation’s creative energy and love for freedom to evolve beyond the corrupt, destructive prison industrial complex that has been ‘normalized’ in our minds. Our children and their children are counting on us to protect their shared future.

Together we can resist the urge to distract ourselves mindlessly shopping for holiday gifts that might bring temporary joy and instead bring mindful awareness to the urgent need to save all we can and create a just and joyful future for ALL.