"Gratitude is a strange emotion to wrestle with in a country that still insists on telling a sanitized Thanksgiving story. We recite the familiar script - a shared harvest, a peaceful gathering - while stepping neatly around the violence that followed. The Wampanoag extended knowledge and hospitality to newcomers who would later drive them from their own land. That tension, that deliberate forgetting, sits quietly beneath the holiday table."
"This year, gratitude found me in an unglamorous place: in a police parking lot on Thanksgiving night. My father-in-law had hit debris on his drive home. My husband was sick. My sister was closest and went first; I followed. This is what my family does - no hesitation, just movement. There's a steadiness in that kind of love, the kind that meets you in the dark on a cold winter night."
"And then there was the AAA driver who arrived at midnight, working through a holiday most people imagine spending around a table. He didn't offer a heroic narrative. He offered a service, one rendered invisible until the moment you need it. I found myself thinking of all the workers whose labor keeps the rest of us upright - from first responders to the people who stock groceries, clean buildings, prepare food and staff clinics."
Gratitude coexists with a sanitized national Thanksgiving narrative that often erases colonial violence and the dispossession of the Wampanoag. Personal gratitude can arise in mundane, unglamorous moments: family members moving without hesitation to help on a cold night and an AAA driver working through the holiday. Many workers render essential services invisibly until their labor is needed. Expressed gratitude that costs nothing does not equal valuing lives. Questions arise about extending livable wages and decent benefits to frontline workers and addressing chronic understaffing and underfunding in the nonprofit sector to achieve structural fairness.
Read at San Jose Spotlight
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