Kevin Collins: A time for thanks -- and interdependence

My detractors, rejoice! One week from now, you will not be reading this column, mostly because I won't be writing one. Rather, I, perhaps like you, will be regretting eating too much the day before, as Thanksgiving is nearly upon us.

Ah, Thanksgiving. Time for turkey and trimmings. Three kinds of pie. My grandmother's annual, arduous, guilt-driven creation of real cranberry sauce with real cranberries, over which everyone chooses the quivering red cylinder that took 30 seconds to plop out of the Ocean Spray can. And of course, football, either in the backyard or on the television, depending on how much of the previous items you ate.

What do all of these elements have in common, other than their common convergence on the fourth Thursday in November? They all usually involve family or friends, and that sense of community is the most important aspect of the holiday. Well, OK, the second most important -- sorry, but pumpkin pie still takes first.

Seriously though, Thanksgiving's shared breaking of bread brings to the forefront the collective interdependence that is all too often neglected in our society. Even the traditional story of Thanksgiving, one of the founding myths of our immigrant nation, ignores this basic principle.

As it is often told, the pilgrims got blown off course and landed at Plymouth Rock. They had a rough start, but through hard work and a Puritan ethic, they created a thriving society for which they gave thanks to God and threw a party -- the first Thanksgiving.

A more accurate telling involves the fact that a bunch of incompetent white guys got lost, nearly half of whom then died during the first winter. Annihilation would have been total but for the fact that they ran into an English-speaking native who both gave them food and showed them how to grow their own. They thanked the natives by throwing a three-day feast (which was nice, even if the natives had to bring most of the food) and by enslaving them and conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Don't we all just love Puritans?

However, a critique of American colonialism is not my point. Americans love to believe that our self-reliance will always carry the day, a belief enshrined in our founding myths and a belief that is as harmful as it is wrong.

For this latter claim, I offer two pieces of evidence. First, President Bush's Cowboy Diplomacy is leaving us with fewer friends and more problems -- problems like mounting casualties in Iraq. A far better example, however, is our national program of welfare "reform."

Such programs are predicated on the belief that the poor can lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Have you ever tried to lift yourself up by your bootstraps? Go ahead, bend over and try it. You're not going to lift your feet one inch, and most likely you are going to fall flat on your ass, which is more or less the effect of these reforms on America's working poor.

This policy, which I'm embarrassed to admit got its start in my home state of Wisconsin, has declared great success in getting single mothers off welfare. Guess what? If you kick women off and stop giving them money, then they're off welfare, but that doesn't mean success for those women and their children.

Moving poor from government assistance to the workplace is an attractive idea, but the way such programs are implemented leaves much to be desired. The working poor are often underemployed with hours too few and wages too small to sustain basic needs. Childcare funding, and the political will for it, is perennially lacking. And privatization of the administration of these reforms, with companies more interested in getting money from the state for themselves than they are in giving it to poor families, doesn't help either.

In sum, the only problem that welfare reform solves is the one of how politicians can get re-elected.

As much as Cowboy Diplomacy and the Kick 'Em Off approach to welfare are flawed policies of particular leaders, they are also flaws of our society as a whole. We are blinded by a handful of Andrew Carnegies to millions of working Americans trapped in their poverty, and for some reason, we believe that the few success stories show the trend while the many more counterexamples are the outliers.

One week from now, many families will have neither real cranberry sauce nor the gelatinous mass fresh from the can. Yes, willingness to volunteer at soup kitchens and donate to food banks increases at this time of year, and even if such charity is needed year-round, it's a step in the right direction. Thankfully also, most people reading this column will not find themselves in this position of need.

In a week's time, most of us will be surrounded by friends and family, giving thanks for our lives and for the help that we've received along the way. Well, the help and the pumpkin pie as well. But as I don't bake, even that is a reminder that life is too much to handle on one's own, and that is the true lesson of Thanksgiving.

Kevin Collins is a sophomore Political Science major from Milwaukee, Wis.

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