Give thanks, dammit!

Thanksgiving is a holiday of lethargy and blah. It's that time of the year we all gather together and give thanks we're not as fat as the that bald uncle who insists that he sit at the head of the table every year.

My aunt put it best when she plopped down on the couch after dinner and declared herself a "beached whale". Which was a completely appropriate description for many of us, on many levels. I consider myself much like a whale in the sense that I feel enormous, much like the mass of a whale, but also by the fact that I feel a little stuck.

I brought home 50 pages of ethics reading and a jarbled page of notes, hoping to get to work on that inevitable final paper that always comes too soon, and I can't do a damn thing. I'm convinced that I've become "beached" on the food, family, readily warm shower water, remarkably soft toilet paper, and overall roominess of non-dorm living. Similar to a beach in its luxuriousness, different in the sense that there is no sand.

I try to understand Republicans; really I do. George Lakoff opened the door for me a bit with an excerpt from his book (link!), but damn them all if they still don't befuddle the hell out of me. It's kind of like (and forgive me for generalizing and simplifying the crap out of this): "Look! There's a man over there who is working 12 hour days to feed his family, has no health insurance, and is still struggling to get everything paid some months. I think I should give him a lecture about the American Dream, and point to radical examples of people who seemingly came out of nowhere to become millionaires! Yes!" or "Let's give the people making a few digits more than him a tax break and wait for the rebates to trickle down in the form of country club golf rounds and italian leather shoes!" or "Hey! I'm a self-made person with an innocent upper-middleclass caucasian background. If I can do it, he can too."

And my theory is that this train of thought comes from over-thinking. Maybe, just maybe if we put that person in the same house or neighborhood as a struggling family, and asked them to stay there for a few hours. Get personable. Sit down, have some coffee. I think there would be some primal form of empathy that would rise to the surface and want this man to have all the means to succeed in life that were available to him. Maybe a tax break. Or some kind of health care he didn't have to pay a quarter of his salary for.

But people are immersed in their own lives. I'm immersed in the noble, self-righteous, typical college student one right now! Maybe what we're immersed in are like little pools. Kiddy pools, we'll say that have a three foot radius and are 7 feet deep. And we're working to stay afloat, but we can see other people's pools. Some closer than others. You can't really get a good feel for what is going on in the other kiddy pools, only what you can see.

So maybe it is better to be beached; to pull yourself out of your safe kiddy pool and flop on the group between the pools. You lose the comfort of immersion, but the view sure is better.