By David Gushee
Thanksgiving week is upon us. The annual celebration centered on gratitude for God’s blessings — for our nation, for family and all other good gifts — comes to a troubled, hungry, divided nation this year.
Thanksgiving was originally a harvest festival. It still conjures up images of abundant material blessings in a fruitful land. Those with means still gather around tables groaning under the weight of turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.
But while our farms are still fruitful, our economic system today leaves out fully one-sixth of all Americans. A recent study placed the number of Americans facing “food insecurity” at 49 million. Another study suggests that the real unemployment and underemployment rate stands at 17.5 percent. Both measures point to a staggering fact: At least one-sixth of all Americans are in serious financial trouble. That’s five students in a classroom of thirty, 50 people in a congregation of 300.
Much of the legislative year has been consumed in a fight over the expansion of health care to a large portion of the American population that does not have adequate access. Thanksgiving will come this year to a nation in which one-third of all Americans lacked health insurance at some point in the last two years, with 46 million lacking health coverage for the entirety of a year. There’s that number again — just under 50 million, or one-sixth of the population, left out of America’s bounty.
Thanksgiving comes this year with Congress closer to passing health-care reform than ever before. Having turned aside one filibuster effort already, the Senate will soon enter into debate on the legislation, a version of which already passed the House. Neither the Senate nor the House legislation has attracted Republican support, with a few tiny exceptions. It is hard for me to imagine that history will judge this Republican foot-dragging any more kindly than it judges similar foot-dragging related to Medicare in 1965 or Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-fighting efforts in the 1930s.
But even if the legislation does pass, it is now increasingly clear that finding ways to generate meaningful and lasting employment for 50 million Americans is the deeper issue. Apparently some kind of second-round stimulus or jobs legislation will be offered early in 2010 by the Democrat-led Congress. It may be that such an effort would help in the short term. But the deeper issues with the economy have to do with the competitiveness of the United States and our workforce vis-à-vis other nations. We need far more than a short-term band-aid in the form of a jobs package paid for with more borrowed money. We need well-educated workers and innovative companies creating products that the entire world wants — as we so often have done in the past.
One place to generate such economic energy is in the “green jobs” sector. Those nations and companies that develop products to support environmentally sustainable economic growth will be huge winners in the 21st century. Right now, it is not at all clear that the United States will lead the way in green jobs as we have so many other new economic sectors in the past century. This has much to do with our national sluggishness in recognizing the extent of our world’s ecological challenges.
Our pastor this past Sunday introduced the holiday season, in part, by expressing concern for those for whom the holidays are a source of pain rather than joy. There are many reasons why Thanksgiving and Christmas would be painful rather than joyful for some people, but the epidemic of family breakdown is probably the major source. Only half of American adolescents live with both biological parents, the result of negative long-term trends in out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce. Thanksgiving this year will find millions of children and adults trying to navigate the enormous and painful complexities created by their fragmented and fragile families. Social-science research clearly shows the negative impact of family disruption on adolescent behavior patterns.
Some kids start off life in our brutally constricted economy at a serious disadvantage due to the chaos in their family lives. We must do better than this. Legislation has little contribution to make here. It’s a battle, one marriage and one family at a time.
When my tribe gathers around the Thanksgiving table on Thursday it will be the first time we have all been together for a long time. I will be grateful to God for many, many blessings. But the gratitude will be shadowed by thoughts of neighbors who are not so fortunate this Thanksgiving Day.