Happy Thanksgiving a message from Norm Pattis

It’s Thanksgiving. You’re at home, or with loved ones, or perhaps alone, hopefully savoring some time away from the workaday world and its troubles. Or perhaps your sorrows are such that they know no surcease: care may weigh you down even today. Maybe you’re at work.

But I say, to one and all, Happy Thanksgiving.

It is still safe to be grateful, isn’t it?

We’re well past that point in the nation’s history when we can say, without irony, as John Winthrop did in 1630, that we are a shining city on a hill, a model to the world, God’s providential patch of righteousness. We’ve come of age in a world forever coming apart; our seams are showing.

We’re still divided on matters of race. And new divisions now compete for the mantle of righteousness. Collegians have discovered “microaggressions” in every slip of the tongue, and campuses simmer over slights real and imagined.

As of this writing, police officers have shot dead 883 people throughout the land thus far this year. Although only 30 of these folk have been unarmed black men, each new shooting of a person of color rips the scab from the wound we call race. Minneapolis is tense; Chicago is tense; Baltimore erupted. Each generation anew finds a way to decry our sordid racial history. Terrorists strut the Earth boasting of their capacity to destroy and longing for the taste of our blood on our soil. Our doors, once open, stand ajar. While some remain committed to a welcoming tradition, others, myself included, wonder whether now is the time to slow down, take stock and end the fantasy that good will is enough to see us through the darkest nights.

And of wars, and rumors of war? The world does not disappoint. Turkey shoots a Russian fighter jet from the sky. Two powerful nations stand on the cusp of violence. A tense world watches, and prepares for a larger conflict we hope will never come.

Americans are suddenly warned about traveling worldwide. Malefactors are on the hunt; we’re targets, after all, in this the best of all possible worlds.

But still, I say, there is ample room for gratitude, and the giving of thanks.

I won’t recount the shopworn story of pilgrims at Plymouth, of Squanto, the native American, emerging from a dark wood to lend a helping, and saving, hand. In a politically correct era, the story is suspect, isn’t it? We stole the land; we slaughtered the first inhabitants.

Let me off history’s wheel for just this once. I tire of the righteous. It sometimes seems as though the most original sin of all is the demand to remake the world in our own image. Isn’t it enough simply to be grateful for the warmth of a good meal and for people who love us, despite our failings?

Today, I give thanks for many things: for good health, for work that sustains, for people who love me despite my many failings, for a judicial system that lurches along with a vision of perfection it fails to meet but strives to satisfy.

I wish the prisons were open to the public. Today would be a good day to share a meal with a prisoner. I think of the men and women I’ve met over the years: some sinners, others far from saints, all made of the same clay. Their groans of despair weigh heavily on a day like today. Do you give thanks when serving life without possibility of parole?

One of the men who has most influenced me is serving such a sentence. I will not mention his name. From time to time, I drop in on him to say hello. His case has been over now for many years. He’s a convicted murderer, and, barring a miracle, will never walk the streets a free man.

“I don’t get it,” I said to him once. “You’ve lost everything, yet you are more at peace than anyone I know.”

He smiled, unfolding his tattooed arms, and leaning back in the plastic chair of the holding cell.

“They have my body,” he said. “But they will never have my mind. I am free,”

He told me that five years ago. I recall it as though it were yesterday.

Necessity has not reduced me to such a stark form of stoicism; I am no Epictetus. But isn’t there some truth in what he said? The prisoner, my friend, possesses dignity.

Ours is an era of identity politics. We profess great regard for the rights of individuals, but, increasingly, demand our due based on the group to which we belong. Everyone’s lives suddenly matter. The press of demands makes the world a mad carousel. It’s exhausting to catalogue, much less honor, all the claims for recognition, validation, and justice.

Thanksgiving day is a good day to refocus, to recalibrate.

I’ll be sharing a meal with family and assorted friends. Across the table from me and beside me will be seated people of differing political persuasions, different gender politics, different sexual orientations. For just a couple of hours, I am hoping that all talk of politics will be banished.

I want simply to pass a boat of gravy to my left, to slice a piece of pie to my right, to sit back and listen to the hum of other’s speaking without needing to defend, to justify, to reason, or even to care all that much about anything but life’s ordinary pleasures.

Thanksgiving is a day of simple truths, of respect for the man, woman or child seated at the table we share in common. Simple human connections make the day special. It is a holiday, a reprieve, from the mad press of politics.

Today, I am giving thanks for many things, you among them. My hope is that if you read this, you accept a hand offered in goodwill. We don’t always agree; indeed, most days I glory in provocation — it’s how I am made.

But not today. Today the message is simple: Happy Thanksgiving.

Norm Pattis, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer with an office in New Haven, blogs at www.pattisblog.com. His new book, “In the Trenches,” is available on Amazon.