20141127.0717

To those who celebrate it: Happy Thanksgiving!

To those who will question the phrasing above: There are people outside the US whom I know and who do not celebrate the holiday. And there are people inside the US who understandably have difficulty finding things for which to be thankful--if they can do so at all. Nor am I certain that they ought to do so--and you ought not to be. It is not your life they live. It is not your circumstances they face. It is not yours to dictate whether they are or are not thankful for the circumstances in which they find themselves. Nor is it yours to dictate whether those circumstances are of their own making; you do not know. And you likely do not want to know--or, rather, you might like to know but are unwilling to do what it takes to know.

And I do know that.

To those who do not celebrate the holiday: fine. I hope your day is good to you and allows you to do some good in the world.

I will be working to do some good for my family. Freelance work continues, and I have a project to do. (I should be able to get it done today.) Its completion will allow me to support my wife and my daughter just a little bit better, and I will admit to being more concerned with matters at the scale of my home than those of the regional, national, or world levels which I cannot meaningfully affect without setting aside the responsibilities which are mine to discharge. (And I am aware that such rhetoric is a tool used to oppress, albeit at lesser levels than others historically documented and unfortunately still ongoing; my deployment of it in reference to myself is a marker of how I have been shaped by such systems, I know.)

To those who will recoil at the thought of working on a holiday: Needs must. Am I not supposed to be diligent in providing for the needs of my family? Do their needs stop because it is a day appointed for celebration? Should I not use the resources available to me--the presence of family in the home--to make easier the work of supporting that family, relying on those here to tend to those here while I apply the skills I have to the task of earning income for them? Is that not the way appointed? And, after all, I am simply sitting at a desk, reading one piece to write another as I do in most of the work that I do; is this really so onerous a task that I need so much respite from it? Am I not derided as part of a class for doing that very thing and presuming to call it work? Why, then, should I leave off from it for a holiday, since it is not "real work" in the eyes of many? More, how should I do so, when there is much to do for the support of my family, to ensure that they have somewhat with which to celebrate if they are going to do so?